depression « The AI-Therapy Blog

Launch

Our July/August 2012 launch exceeded our expectations. We’ve had over 3500 visits so far, so thanks to everyone for checking us out and helping spread the word. We’re still actively promoting the site, so please contact us if you have any ideas about how we can reach more people. Any links, blog reviews, etc. would be great.

New free online social anxiety symptom assessment

Shortly after launch we added a free symptom test for social anxiety.

Blog

We will put out a new blog every week (give or take) on a wide range of topics. Some recent entries include:

Anger myths and facts – how to prevent future outbursts

How Excel can help you achieve goals

How to avoid the “Top 5 regrets of the dying”

The problem with self help books – they can make social anxiety worse!

Social phobia vs Spider phobia

Spider phobia (aka arachnophobia)

Future

We’ve got lots of exciting ideas in the works, so please keep an eye on the blog and come back soon!

Thank you for visiting! As always, we’d love to hear from you as our goal is to be constantly improving our site.

Fjola Helgadottir, PhD, MClinPsych, is a clinical psychologist, a senior research clinician at the University of Oxford, and is a co-creator of AI-Therapy.com, an online CBT treatment program for overcoming social anxiety

Internet CBT treatment for social phobia. What is it?

A man [woman] who does not think for himself [herself] does not think at all.
-Oscar Wilde

I added the brackets to remind you, my dear reader, that it is 2012.

Internet CBT treatment for social phobia

I have created a video to help explain Internet CBT treatment for social phobia. One goal of this treatment is finding out what type of thinking people use. The video is designed to help people become more aware of these thoughts. Thinking about thinking is the first step.

Social phobia is characterised by an inflated threat perception in social situations. Sufferers experience intense fear of negative evaluation and see amplified threats in being judged by others. This exaggerated fear response has a marked impact on their relationships with others, in both public (e.g. work) and private life (e.g relationships). Frequently people suffer from low mood and exhaustion due to the distress the problem causes. Sufferers fear, avoid, or endure with significant stress the following: conversations, meeting new people, expressing a controversial opinion or disagreement, being assertive, speaking in front of a group, being the centre of attention, eating, drinking, or making mistakes in front of others.

Our Internet CBT treatment for social phobia (http://www.AI-Therapy.com) is a professional website incorporating a computerised CBT practitioner that we have been building since 2007. CBT, or Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, is a well known treatment approach supported by several hundred controlled experimental trials. Our Internet CBT treatment for social phobia offers you a fully automated computer psychologist that tailors your treatment to the specific symptoms that you report to the system. The database it uses is derived from a wealth of psychological data gathered in major anxiety and mood clinics over the past 20 years.

Your subscription lasts for 6 months, and includes the following online treatment procedures: (1) cognitive restructuring exercises; (2) mindfulness tasks; (3) exposure exercises and behavioural experiments; (4) education about the nature of anxiety and depression; (5) quizzes to test your growing understanding of your condition and its treatment; (6) emails to motivate and remind you to access the program; (7) online assessment tools to measure your improvement; and (8) voice overs by me Fjola and Ross explaining each treatment procedure covered in the program.

AI-Therapy is an Internet-based CBT treatment for social phobia comprising 7 sections. Section 1 helps the user get in the habit of becoming aware of their thoughts and behaviours. Sections 2-6 teach strategies to address unhelpful thinking and behaviours. Section 7 is focused on relapse prevention so that the user can maintain their changes in the long run.

Try a 10 questions free social phobia symptoms test

Social anxiety is a persistent and chronic mental health problem¹. It is estimated that between 7%-12% of people experience social anxiety at some point in their life². This means that it impacts from four to seven million people in Britain alone!

The problem of social anxiety can come in many forms, such as extreme shyness, or worry about negative evaluation by other people. It is often persistent throughout an individual’s lifetime, and therefore determining the age of onset can be a complicated matter³. Research data on childhood social anxiety is scarce⁴ , but several authors report that onset is typical in the mid-teens or early adulthood⁵.

The vast majority of people who struggle from social anxiety never seek any treatment.⁶ It is widely established that a social phobia diagnosis is frequently missed in primary care worldwide.⁷ The shame and embarrassment that lie at the heart of social phobia are highly likely to be contributors to this phenomenon. Indeed, the embarrassment is the primary reason why socially anxious individuals do not report their symptoms to their family doctor⁸. In a study of 9,282 individuals it was evident that those with the most severe social phobia were the least likely to receive treatment⁹.

Astonishingly, once the diagnosis has been made, it can take up to 17 years for treatment to be sought.

One solution is online CBT treatment for social anxiety

Given the above problems, there is a strong need to find and facilitate ways to make it easier for socially phobic individuals to seek and receive professional help¹⁰. One of the goals of AI-Therapy is to address this problem. The core ideas were developed as part of my PhD research, but have now been extended to be an online self-help treatment for a wider audience. One goal behind this method of service is to reach those who would never make into a psychology clinic in the first place. Furthermore, it provides an option for those who, for one reason or another, are unable to see a psychologist on a regular basis. Finally, the anonymity of online therapy can be an advantage for some clients.

1) Yonker 2003

2) Furmark, 2002; Kessler et al., 2005; Ruscio et al., 2008

3) Rapee, Schniering, & Hudson, 2009.

4) Rapee et al., 2009

5) Antony & Rowa, 2008; Antony, Federici, & Stein, 2009; Hofmann et al., 2009

6) Beck & Clark, D. A., 2010.

7) Beck & Clark, D. A., 2010; Lampe, 2009.

8) Davidson, 2007

9) Ruscio et al., 2008.

10) Beck & Clark, D. A., 2010; Lampe, 2009.

Nobody sat down and decided to create the Internet

In March 1989 the blueprint for the Internet were sent by Tim Bernes-Lee to his boss at CERN. It had the humble title of: Information Management: A Proposal. The comment he got back was “Interesting, but vague”, but he was allowed to continue to pursue this Information Management System. It’s creation was motivated by Tim wanting to communicate with other researchers around the world. For this he created what we now know as the Internet. It certainly is not exclusive to nerdy researchers anymore, more accurately it takes up most of our waking lives!

The community needs better access to evidence based techniques

AI-Therapy.com came about in a bit similar manner. I was finishing my clinical psychology Internships in Sydney, Australia. However, before my last year had finished I was awarded a prestigious PhD scholarship at the University of Sydney. There was a major dilemma, do I miss out of this exciting scholarship award which was funded to respond to the need for evidence based treatments using the internet, or do I not finish my clinical psychology training/internships?

From this AI-Therapy was born.

My solution to this problem was to generate a fully automated computer psychologist which could be treating people online simultaneously with me working at the various hospital settings for my internships. It turns out, that to solve my problem of doing two things at once, I created a product which helped bridge the gap between the need for access to evidence based psychology techniques in the general community. After many years of hard work, I am pleased to announce that this service is now available to the general public under the name of AI-Therapy overcome social anxiety. You can see how it works here.

If you are interested in the original research for this computer psychology service, please refer to the following research and the associated publications