New Frontiers – CBT for Social Anxiety: State of the Science and Art

APN CLINICAL FOCUS WEBINAR SERIES

‘New Frontiers – CBT for Social Anxiety: State of the Science and Art’

Prof Peter McEvoy, Senior Clinical Psychologist, Centre for Clinical Interventions, & School of Psychology, Curtin University

About the ‘New Frontiers’ webinars: In 2020 the Anxiety Practitioners Network will be bringing you a range of webinars aimed at providing an up to date review of the current evidence-based psychological treatments for the anxiety disorders as well as emerging treatment innovations to help further improve treatment outcomes.

About this webinar: Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is one of the most common mental disorders, and it can have severely detrimental impacts on an individual’s ability to reach their social and occupational potential. People with SAD have a core fear of evaluation from others, which is associated with a range of maintaining factors such as negative thoughts and images relating to social threat, avoidance and safety behaviours, self-focused attention, negative core beliefs about the self and others, and anticipatory and post-event processing (i.e., rumination). This seminar will briefly review some of the dominant maintenance models of SAD and will then describe core components of treatment designed to target these maintaining factors with some case examples. Handouts and worksheets that can help to guide therapists and clinicians through the key strategies will be provided. Recent face-to-face and online approaches to treating SAD will also be reviewed.

About the presenter: Peter McEvoy is a Senior Clinical Psychologist at the Centre for Clinical Interventions and a teaching and research Professor in the School of Psychology at Curtin University, Perth. After completing his clinical masters and PhD degrees at the University of Western Australia he worked at the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, for four years before moving back to Perth. He has personally run more than 50 SAD treatment groups and has led a research program evaluating group CBT with imagery ‘enhancements’, and has recently completed an NHMRC-funded randomised controlled trial comparing group CBT to ‘imagery-enhanced’ CBT for SAD. He is the lead author of “Imagery-Enhanced CBT for Social Anxiety Disorder”, published by Guilford Press (co-authors Lisa Saulsman & Ron Rapee). He has a strong research track record, having published over 110 journal articles, and has been an Associate Editor for the Journal of Anxiety Disorders since 2015.