Research Study 1

Wright, Joseph A., Clum, George A., Roodman, Allison and Febbraro, Greg A.R. A Biblio-therapy Approach to Relapse-Prevention in Individuals with Panic Attacks. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, in press.

This article is a follow-up to the one research study that failed to show that a self-help intervention based on the book Coping With Panic was more effective than a control condition. (Click here to see the results of that study.)

In this study a group of individuals suffering from panic attacks who had read the Coping With Panic Relapse-Prevention Manual were compared to a group of individuals who did not read the manual. Individuals in the group reading Coping With Panic Relapse-Prevention Manual were also called on a monthly basis to answer questions and to encourage them to read and apply strategies discussed in the manual. At the end of 6-months all participants (those who read and those who didn't) were again contacted and evaluated using a battery of questionnaires designed to assess the severity of their panic problem.

Results comparing the two groups supported the conclusion that reading the Coping with Panic Relapse Prevention Manual and being called on a monthly basis to provide encouragement yielded significant improvement compared to the group of individuals not reading the book. Specifically, when number of panic attacks was measured over the entire 6-month period, individuals reading the Coping with Panic Relapse Prevention Manual were found to have significantly fewer panic attacks. In addition, individuals reading the Coping With Panic Relapse-Prevention Manual had less severe attacks, less anticipatory anxiety and less agoraphobic avoidance than did individuals not exposed to the manual. Individuals in the group receiving the Coping With Panic Relapse-Prevention Manual also had less severe levels of depression than individuals not receiving the manual.

The authors concluded that the Coping With Panic Relapse-Prevention Manual was an effective means of improving the adjustment of panic sufferers, especially when combined with monthly phone calls of brief duration.

This latter point is especially important since the individuals in this study were identical to those that Febbraro and colleagues studied who failed to improve relative to a control group. The difference between the group that improved with biblio-therapy compared to the group that did not was the simple procedure of using brief phone calls to provide encouragement.