CBT for GAD – or maybe EMDR

The psychologists are finding new therapy tools that have achieved considerable success in some hard-to-treat conditions. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been around for some time. It combines two very effective kinds of psychotherapy — cognitive therapy and behavior therapy. Cognitive therapy shows you how certain thinking patterns are causing your symptoms, by giving you a distorted picture of what's going on, and making you anxious, depressed or angry. Behavior therapy helps you weaken the connections between troublesome situations and your habitual reactions to them, such as fear, depression, or anger. It teaches you how to calm your mind and body, so you can feel better, think more clearly, and make better decisions. When combined into CBT, cognitive therapy and behavior therapy provide a powerful tool for stopping your symptoms and getting your life on a more satisfying track.

CBT has now been shown to help people with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD. This can be quite disabling – victims worry about almost anything, even when there’s often nothing to worry about.

A report in the Cochrane Library has reviewed 25 studies with 1,300 participants. CBT produced improvement in anxiety symptoms in 46% patients, while only 14% of those who merely remained on a waiting list for therapy only had improvement. The report also showed that individual (one-on-one) CBT was more successful than group behavioral therapy.

What about EMDR? The letters stand for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It started in the late 1990s, but it’s attracting quite a lot of attention recently because of its effectiveness in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In EMRD the patient moves his or her eyes back and forth, hither and thither, while concentrating on whatever problem they have. The therapist waves a stick or light in front of the patient and the patient is tries to follow the moving stick or light with their eyes. The Skeptics Dictionary posts a pretty critical review of EMRD, which is worth looking at before spending a lot of cash on a course of the therapy. We’ll have to wait a bit, too, until the Cochrane Review takes up a comparison of CBT and EMRD in GAD, or other psychological problems.