A One Day Expedited Treatment for Adults with Anxiety Disorders

Due to the high rates of comorbidity between the anxiety disorders, the intervention will be transdiagnostic, meaning it will target multiple anxiety disorders simultaneously. Participants will receive 6 hours of treatment in a single day (10am-6pm with a 1 hour lunch break, and two 30 minute breaks (morning tea and afternoon tea; not provided). The treatment will be manualised/standardised and include standard cognitive and behavioural interventions that have been found to be efficacious in other studies (Norton, 2008; Titov et al., 2010; Norton et al., 2012). The treatment will be delivered face-to-face by Master of Clinical Psychology students in the purpose-built clinical psychology facilities at the University of Technology Sydney. All sessions will be audio-recorded. A minimum of 10% of all treatment sessions will be reviewed to ensure fidelity to the treatment manual. Participants will receive psychoeducation on the nature of anxiety disorders, the cognitive-behavioural model, and cognitive behavioural therapy. Using the information obtained during the diagnostic interview, the therapist will assist participants in identifying unhelpful thoughts/beliefs and unhelpful behaviours and assist the client in putting these in to the CBT model. Unhelpful beliefs will be challenged via two cognitive techniques – examining the evidence for and against the thought and behavioural experiments, both are standard and commonly used cognitive interventions delivered as part of CBT. Examining the evidence involves looking at each thought/belief and looking at the evidence to support and contradict it. The goal of this intervention is to help the client to see their thought/belief in a more realistic way. Behavioural experiments help the client to test out their thinking by making predictions about what they think will happen when they do something they fear (i.e., talk to a stranger for someone with social anxiety disorder) and then do the task and observe the outcome. This technique helps client to see that they are generally over-estimating the likelihood of bad things happening, and even if something they predict does happen (i.e., the person is not nice to them) that they can cope with this. Worksheets will be used to assist in the delivery of this intervention. Relapse prevention involves summarising the interventions and setting up a plan to prevent any future relapse. The therapist and participant will also set up homework that the participant can continue to work on during the follow up period.