ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the treatment of anxiety disorders and begins with some reminders regarding the limitations of "empirically supported treatments," address available treatments for anxiety quadrant-by-quadrant. Treatments for anxiety disorders run quite a gamut, from pharmacological and behavioral to psychodynamic, cognitive, and existential, just to name a few. Several dozen meta-analytic reviews of treatments for anxiety disorders have been performed. Behavioral interventions that appear helpful in treating anxiety disorders include modeling, behavioral skills training, assertiveness training, and exposure treatments, the latter of which include both flooding and systematic desensitization. The more traditional psychodynamic approaches that have not developed radically beyond S. Freud's formulations aim, in general, to make the patient conscious of how anxiety stems from unconscious impulses to act out sexual and aggressive impulses. Imagine a person seeking therapy to help with recurrent panic attacks, Social Anxiety Disorder, or some other anxiety disorder.
