Increasing Availability of Exposure Therapy Through Intensive Group Treatment for Childhood Anxiety and OCD.
A week-long group CBT camp slashes therapist hours yet still beats childhood anxiety and OCD.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team ran a 5-day crash course of exposure-based CBT. Kids with anxiety or OCD came in groups.
They met from morning to afternoon for one week. Staff tracked symptoms before and after.
Families drove from several states to attend. The goal was to see if a short, packed format still helped.
What they found
Symptoms dropped from medium-to-large levels. Kids also missed less school and activities.
Therapist hours fell by one third compared with weekly sessions. Travel time for families stayed low.
The brief group model looked like a win-win: less clinician time, wider reach, solid gains.
How this fits with other research
Saunders et al. (1988) once said behavioral help for child OCD gave only modest, shaky results. Schertz et al. (2018) now shows bigger, steadier gains. The difference: earlier work used tiny single cases; the new study used a clear group protocol.
Strauss (1988) warned that over-anxious kids lacked good treatments. Thirty years later, the 5-day camp shows a practical fix exists.
Ganz et al. (2009) taught emotion skills with neutral cues first. H et al. go straight to real exposures in a group. Both cut OCD symptoms, so you can pick the pace that fits your client.
Why it matters
You can copy the 5-day plan to shrink wait lists. Pack sessions into school breaks. One clinician can serve more kids in less time. Track daily scores to prove progress to payers. If a child travels far, send home a booster plan so parents keep the win alive.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Archival data were used to examine the feasibility of a 5-day, clinic-based, intensive exposure-based cognitive-behavioral group therapy for childhood anxiety disorders (CADs) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Participants were 143 children (82 girls) aged 6 to 19 years ( M = 13.93 years, SD = 2.9 years) with CADs or OCD (or both) in 28 consecutive groups. Repeated-measures ANOVA in the subsample ( n = 57) with complete treatment data indicated positive change on all variables from pretreatment to posttreatment with few differences between CADs and OCD patients. Effect sizes were moderate to large for anxiety symptoms (parent reported = 0.74, child reported = 0.65) and impairment (parent reported = 1.02, child reported = 0.69). The intensive group protocol required fewer sessions and 36% fewer therapist-hours per patient than the individually administered protocol. The program increased treatment availability for families from diverse geographic areas ( M distance traveled to clinic = 407 miles, SD = 786.4 miles). These findings support further, well-controlled examination of the 5-day intensive group treatment protocol's efficacy and potential to increase availability of evidence-based exposure therapy.
Behavior modification, 2018 · doi:10.1177/0145445517730831