One treatment might help many with emotional and mood disorders

People with emotional and mood disorders—such as anxiety disorders, panic attacks or post-traumatic stress disorder—may experience their emotions in similar ways and may respond well to a single, unified treatment that takes these commonalities into account, said anxiety researcher David H. Barlow, PhD, at Saturday address at APA's Annual Convention.

Those common features include: 

• Difficulty accepting the experience of negative emotions, whether its fear, anger or depression.

• Attempts to suppress these emotions.

• Difficulty regulating these emotions.

Barlow, a Boston University professor and director Emeritus of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, and colleagues are now testing a treatment to help people with these emotion and mood disorders. The treatment is based on flexible modules that can be tailored for each person and on empirically supported principles of change. If successful, it may give practitioners access to a single tool for a wide variety of patients, Barlow said.

“Instead of having to master, say, 12 different treatment manuals, they’d just have to master one,” he said. “The idea is to create a treatment that’s easy to disseminate and much more user-friendly for psychologists than current approaches.”