Efficacy of a one-week overcoming social anxiety program

The internet-delivered Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Program comprises 6 lessons completed over 7 days. It includes psychoeducation about anxiety and management of its physical symptoms, graded exposure to overcome avoidance, behavioural experiments to test maladaptive beliefs, thought challenging to address unhelpful thoughts, social skills training and relapse prevention. A new lesson will become available each day (with the exception of Day 6, which is devoted to practicing challenging skills), with participants expected to complete one lesson per day. Each lesson will take approximately 30-40 minutes to read. Participants will have access to summaries of each lesson, homework exercises and extra resources for each lesson. Participants are advised to spend at least 3-4 hours per day (for a 7 days) working through the lesson material, revisiting the content and homework tasks/practicing the skills. Clinician guidance will be provided to participants randomly allocated to the intervention group in the form of email or phone contact from the clinicians (registered clinical psychologist; registered provisional psychologist undertaking postgraduate training). Participants in the intervention group are able to email or phone the clinician at any point during the trial. Participants in the waitlist control group can contact research staff for technical assistance at any point via phone or email. Participants in the intervention group will complete a measure of social anxiety symptoms, depression, and personality traits and functioning before the first lesson (baseline), one week after the program (two weeks post baseline), and at 1-month follow-up (six weeks post baseline). Participants in the control group will complete these same measures at baseline, two weeks post baseline, and six weeks post baseline before being offered the intervention program. Across both groups, if participants' scores deteriorate by 4 or more points, the clinician is automatically alerted and initiates contact with the participant by phone or email. If the participant has an elevated distress or depression score, the clinician is automatically alerted and initiates contact with the participant by phone or email. The mode of contact is dependent on what is clinically indicated in terms of the participant's distress score and/or what the participant may have communicated (in the form of phone or email contact) to the clinician. The mode of contact (email or phone or both) therefore is dependent on the clinician's clinical judgement of the situation in hand. Strategies used to improve adherence to intervention protocols and procedures for monitoring adherence include: automated email reminders, monitoring the downloading of homework, and collection of data on how long participants spent reading lessons and practicing skills.