Abstract
The current study evaluated the utility of a pretreatment intervention aimed at increasing treatment attendance. We extended past work by evaluating whether this intervention was associated with less impairment at termination. Given that patients with anxiety disorders demonstrate high rates of premature termination, we assessed whether these patients would be particularly likely to benefit. The sample included 172 patients at a community outpatient mental health clinic. Patients were assigned to the intervention condition (asked to imagine attending therapy sessions) or an information control condition. Number of sessions attended and termination Clinician Global Impressions (CGI) served as outcome variables. Contrary to prior work, the two conditions did not significantly differ on outcomes. Yet, patients with anxiety disorders in the intervention condition attended the most sessions and had least termination symptom severity. This intervention may provide a simple yet powerful method to increase treatment adherence and effectiveness for patients with anxiety disorders.
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Notes
The total number of diagnoses exceeds the number of study participants due to comorbidity. Similarly, the total number of anxiety diagnoses exceeds the number of patients with anxiety disorders because some patients received more than one anxiety disorder diagnosis and the total number of depressive disorder diagnoses exceeds the number of patients with depressive disorder because some patients received more than one depressive disorder diagnosis.
Therapists failed to record termination CGI’s for 62 patients (i.e., total number of termination CGI’s recorded was 110). The vast majority of patients for whom termination CGI was not recorded attended 0–1 sessions (79.0%) and only 3% finished intake and began psychosocial treatment, thereby rendering the assessment of termination CGI impossible for the majority of these patients.
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Acknowledgment
This research was supported in part by a National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Drug Abuse (F31 DA12457-01) awarded to Julia D. Buckner.
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Buckner, J.D., Cromer, K.R., Merrill, K.A. et al. Pretreatment Intervention Increases Treatment Outcomes for Patients with Anxiety Disorders. Cogn Ther Res 33, 126–137 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-007-9154-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-007-9154-x