Stress Control: A Pilot Study of Large Group Therapy for Generalized Anxiety Disorder

1990 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim White ◽  
Mary Keenan

A pilot study is reported on a six session didactic large group treatment package for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) patients referred to a primary care service. Thirty patients underwent the course. By combining a didactic therapy element with workshops, the therapy package allowed a much larger number of individuals to attend the group than could be dealt with in “traditional” group therapy. Two psychologists ran the course. There were few practical difficulties involved in running the course and the range of self-report outcome measures suggest that large group didactic therapy may be a clinically and cost-effective treatment for GAD.

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim White

While treatments for Generalized Anxiety Disorder have considerably improved recently, they remain less effective than similar treatments for other anxiety disorders. This paper reports on a comparative outcome study of a large group didactic therapy specifically designed to teach patients to “become their own therapists” in an attempt to counter the relapse problems commonly associated with this condition. The data suggest that improvements noted at six month follow-up are maintained at two years. Suggestions are forwarded to explain the lack of differential responding found among different therapy approaches.


Psychotherapy ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Salzer ◽  
Aaron L. Pincus ◽  
Christel Winkelbach ◽  
Falk Leichsenring ◽  
Eric Leibing

2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 224-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey R. Strawn ◽  
Wen-Jang Chu ◽  
Rachel M. Whitsel ◽  
Wade A. Weber ◽  
Matthew M. Norris ◽  
...  

Assessment ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 107319112110625
Author(s):  
Tom H. Rosenström ◽  
Ville Ritola ◽  
Suoma Saarni ◽  
Grigori Joffe ◽  
Jan-Henry Stenberg

Assessment of treatment response in psychotherapies can be undermined by lack of longitudinal measurement invariance (LMI) in symptom self-report inventories, by measurement error, and/or by wrong model assumptions. To understand and compare these threats to validity of outcome assessment in psychotherapy research, we studied LMI, sum scores, and Davidian Curve Item Response Theory models in a naturalistic guided internet psychotherapy treatment register of 2,218 generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) patients and 3,922 depressive disorder (DD) patients (aged ≥16 years). Symptoms were repeatedly assessed by Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment-7 (GAD-7) or Beck Depression Inventory. The symptom self-reports adhered to LMI under equivalence testing, suggesting sum scores are reasonable proxies for disorder status. However, the standard LMI assumption of normally distributed latent factors did not hold and inflated treatment response estimates by 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviation units compared with sum scores. Further methodological research on non-normally distributed latent constructs holds promise in advancing LMI and mental health assessment.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Di Matteo ◽  
Wendy Wang ◽  
Kathryn Fotinos ◽  
Sachinthya Lokuge ◽  
Julia Yu ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND The ability to objectively measure the severity of depression and anxiety disorders in a passive manner could have a profound impact on the way in which these disorders are diagnosed, assessed, and treated. Existing studies have demonstrated links between both depression and anxiety and the linguistic properties of words that people use to communicate. Smartphones offer the ability to passively and continuously detect spoken words to monitor and analyze the linguistic properties of speech produced by the speaker and other sources of ambient speech in their environment. The linguistic properties of automatically detected and recognized speech may be used to build objective severity measures of depression and anxiety. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine if the linguistic properties of words passively detected from environmental audio recorded using a participant’s smartphone can be used to find correlates of symptom severity of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and general impairment. METHODS An Android app was designed to collect periodic audiorecordings of participants’ environments and to detect English words using automatic speech recognition. Participants were recruited into a 2-week observational study. The app was installed on the participants’ personal smartphones to record and analyze audio. The participants also completed self-report severity measures of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and functional impairment. Words detected from audiorecordings were categorized, and correlations were measured between words counts in each category and the 4 self-report measures to determine if any categories could serve as correlates of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, or general impairment. RESULTS The participants were 112 adults who resided in Canada from a nonclinical population; 86 participants yielded sufficient data for analysis. Correlations between word counts in 67 word categories and each of the 4 self-report measures revealed a strong relationship between the usage rates of death-related words and depressive symptoms (<i>r</i>=0.41, <i>P</i>&lt;.001). There were also interesting correlations between rates of word usage in the categories of reward-related words with depression (<i>r</i>=–0.22, <i>P</i>=.04) and generalized anxiety (<i>r</i>=–0.29, <i>P</i>=.007), and vision-related words with social anxiety (<i>r</i>=0.31, <i>P</i>=.003). CONCLUSIONS In this study, words automatically recognized from environmental audio were shown to contain a number of potential associations with severity of depression and anxiety. This work suggests that sparsely sampled audio could provide relevant insight into individuals’ mental health. CLINICALTRIAL


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