A Possible Alternative to Exposure Therapy May Reduce Anxiety Without Heightening It

Many therapists who practice exposure therapy want to elicit as much anxiety from their patients as possible as a way to desensitize them to that which causes them extreme anxiety. Therapists often refuse to give their patients rational explanations for why exposures to their feared situations or items will not cause them harm because, they say, it could reduce their anxiety and lessen the results of the treatment. For many patients, the anxiety is too much to bare. The question I have is, is this the best approach? Ultimately, how does it leave patients down the road? And what about the many patients who simply cannot endure the heightened levels of anxiety? There is another method -- Danger Ideation Reduction Therapy, or DIRT for short, where education by experts, exactly the opposite of what’s being commonly touted by behavioralists, has helped most patients significantly by reducing their fears rathering than increasing them. This approach needs to be tested on larger numbers of patients to see if it is truly effective, but it appears to have the added benefit of involving the patient’s intellect, which seems useful considering that what makes anxiety a disorder is its inappropriateness, or irrationality.

See Danger Ideation Reduction Therapy (DIRT) for treatment-resistant compulsive washing and Treating obsessive compulsive disorder: a new role for infectious diseases physicians?