Interoceptive exposure (IE) involves using exercises (e.g., hyperventilation) to deliberately evoke feared bodily sensations (e.g., shortness of breath; tightness in chest). It is most commonly associated with panic disorder treatment. In a recent paper, anxiety disorders expert and UNC professor Dr. [...]
Throughout the years, I’ve written a series of blogs posts on exposure therapy, including the use of exposure therapy in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. In the absence of much guidance on using exposure in ACT, I co-authored a theoretical paper on its [...]
A common figure for the dropout rate of exposure and response prevention (ERP) for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder is about 25%. During one OCD workshop I attended, 2 different presenters insinuated that these high rates of dropout were the result of one [...]
Excoriation or skin picking has often been in the shadow of its nearest relative, trichotillomania or repetitive hair pulling. One good thing to come out of the DSM-5 was that it finally made skin picking disorder an official diagnosis—excoriation. Prior to the DSM-5, there was [...]
Numerous studies have now shown that Exposure and Response (or Ritual) Prevention (ERP) remains our most effective treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In ERP, clients deliberately confront feared stimuli while learning to refrain from engaging in compulsions. Even with the effectiveness [...]
In a previous post, I linked to a blog post about therapist reluctance to use exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is one of the most effective interventions for anxiety-related problems but, sadly, remains under-utilized by clinicians. It is an intervention that has been a major [...]
Eric Morris, PhD, a psychologist in Australia, wrote a really interesting blog post about therapist reluctance to use exposure. As I’ve written about in previous posts, exposure therapy is one of the most effective interventions we have in treating anxiety-related disorders, such [...]
In a special issue of Behavior Therapy on “The Theory-Practice Gap in Cognitive Behavior Therapy,” Jonathan Abramowitz, PhD, authored an interesting paper on the importance of understanding theory when doing exposure therapy. Dr. Abramowitz is a well-respected OCD researcher, and I was attracted to this [...]
A practice I’m seeing more often that concerns me is the addition of antipsychotic medications on top of antidepressants when the antidepressants aren’t working. If someone isn’t showing improvement on an antidepressant alone, a prescriber may add an antipsychotic medication—the [...]
This post was featured on our client-centered blog The Art and Science of Living Well, but I thought it would be of interest to therapists as well. The post is about a finding from a meta-analysis by Cuipjers and colleagues that looked [...]