Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) for Anxiety Diagnoses in a Primary Care Setting

Anxiety Treatment in Primary Care: an Evaluation of Intensive Dynamic Short-term Therapy

Living with anxiety often means great suffering for the person affected. The trend points to a continued increase in anxiety problems in the population, especially in the 18-44 age group. Inadequate treatment of this condition can lead to long-term sick leave, isolation, exclusion and, in the worst case, to death. The treatment methods that are available in primary care today help some but far from all. Therefore, the investigators want to scientifically evaluate a shorter version of a proven emotion-focused psychotherapy in order to increase the treatment range for this patient group. The aim of this project is to, in a primary care setting, test and evaluate an intensive, emotion-focused short-term therapy, ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy) for patients with an anxiety diagnosis. The method is well-proven on patients with more severe mental conditions (personality disorders) with good results, but the treatment has only been tested to a limited extent on patients with anxiety symptoms. The investigators want to investigate the effectiveness of treating various anxiety states for primary care patients. The treatment is expected to provide an addition to today's methods, which overall will provide better treatment results for this, increasing in number, group of patients who often seek primary care.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Primary Care patients with primary anxiety diagnoses at a Health Care clinic in Sweden. Sufficient language competence in Swedish is required of the participants to understand, read, speak and write.

Exclusion Criteria:

• Major reading-writing and learning difficulties, severe psychiatric problems such as psychosis, eating disorder, current major depression, recurrent depression, severe trauma, acute crisis reaction, exhaustion, acute risk of suicide (assessed according to the suicide scale), addiction.
• Diagnosed specific phobia or obsessive-compulsive disorder that must be primarily treated with CBT. Concurrent psychological treatment, anxiety-relieving medication such as benzodiazepines, or recently started antidepressant treatment (< 3 months of treatment) are also exclusion criteria for participation in the study.