Half Of Group Free Of Phobia After A Single Treatment

Fifty five percent of children who undertook this intensive one-session therapy were freed of their phobia. The treatment which is carried out on a single occasion is very cost-effective and quick. It doesn’t have any side effects. This form of treatment is also culture-neutral and needs not be adapted from place to place.

Lena Reuterskiold says “Children who are not cured of their phobias run a great risk of developing other areas of anxiety later on. It’s therefore important to find effective forms of treatment that can reduce this risk. The method we have now tested also functions for other types of phobias.

In a single session phobia treatment, the therapist slowly guides children to their fears in a controlled and planned manner. The therapist carefully describes and demonstrates everything before the infant is even allowed to try. Since children are put in an anxiety inducing situation, they can experience conditionings that give rise to their fears and phobias as well as those which abate their fears. Finally they are also shown how the expected catastrophe wouldn’t occur. As the patient remains in this situation for a prolonged period of time instead of running away from it, new learning occurs, which in turn produces a new behavior. All this is performed in a voluntary basis, which is an important precondition for a successful treatment.

“One-session phobia treatment has also proven to be effective over time. Adults who have been treated with this method have been able to notice the effects of the treatment more than a year after the session. And nothing indicates that the effect would taper off sooner in children, which we assume will soon be confirmed by a follow-up study,” says Lena Reuterskiöld.

Other than the time aspect, this treatment offers many other positive consequences.

In cases where the kids suffered several other anxieties besides that targeted by the treatment, these too were alleviated within a single session treatment. This indicates that infants adopt knowledge that they attain from a brief intervention and apply it upon other problem areas as well.

This dissertation is derived from 3 empirical studies of adolescents and children, suffering from a variety of specific phobias in Stockholm, Sweden, and Virginia, US. The specific purpose of the study was to contribute to our understanding of phobias and phobias in children. It also helped us evaluate the transferability and efficacy of these single-session treatments for specific phobias in children who belonged to different cultures.

The most important answer produced by the study is that one session treatment is highly effective for children indulged in different types of phobias, that the post-treatment effects last for at least six months, and that this treatment seems transferable from one culture to another.

“Fears, anxiety, and specific phobias in children and adolescents are no new phenomena, but their incidence seems to be increasing. Fortunately our understanding and willingness to treat them has also grown,” says Lena Reuterskiöld.