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Check out our ADAA members' new books that offer help for the public and support for professionals.

Often times, people struggling to move on from a breakup inadvertently act in ways that amplify their emotions of love towards the person, but these urges usually make us feel worse in the long term. So, what can we do? Enter “Opposite Action.”

Fear is one of the six basic human emotions, with a clear evolutionary purpose: to help us respond to danger and survive. In Exposure Therapy, providers create a safe environment to intentionally “expose” their clients to objects, activities, or situations they fear.

Experts Mona Potter, MD and Kathryn Boger, PhD, ABPP recently partnered with ADAA to host an insightful Q&A webinar addressing strategies for parenting children with anxiety and OCD. This blog to addresses the most common themes that emerged from the questions asked during the webinar.

In collaboration with The Reach Institute, Dr. Wallace explains how parents can decrease the impact of anxiety on children and teens to help them function their best and find more joy in their lives.

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the term social anxiety has been thrown around as a catchall for the discomfort many felt as restrictions lifted and we began to resume our lives. However, it too can oversimplify the greater intensity of anxiety, and associated impact, experienced by those with Social Anxiety Disorder.

The ability to be ourselves with clients makes it so much easier to connect, to be real about how challenging treatment is, and enlist their help to ensure that whatever the exposure is, its something they can tolerate, trust in, and most importantly, begin to experience relief from their intrusive thoughts and the compulsions that may dominate their lives. 

The recommendation most difficult to absorb by most clinicians is the suggestion that interventions that lower expectations of catastrophic or negative outcomes of exposure should be minimized in order to take advantage of the therapeutic effect of violating expectations. The question then arises as to how to motivate patients to do the exposure work while in the grip of serious anticipatory anxiety and suffering from the effects of their own anxiety sensitivity.

As COVID restrictions get a little less and less frigid with the ongoing vaccination campaigns, a lot of us are very excited to resume some of our normal work and social life. At the same time, we may experience a burst of anxiety as we start to get out of quarantine-- after all, it’s been a really long time, right?!  To help ease up that anxious feeling, Dr. Carmichael has packaged some of her favorite pointers into an easy-to-remember acronym of S.U.N. to help you cope!

Many mental health professionals are now conducting patient visits virtually. I am one of the only psychologists left in my building who has stayed behind to continue in-person work while abiding by COVID protocols. Since our practice specializes in refractory OCD spectrum disorders and anxiety disorders a lot of the work done at our outpatient clinic requires in-vivo exposures, which cannot be replicated on Zoom.

As a result of this collective pandemic experience, more of us have experienced loss, both expected and unexpected. How do we manage these feelings of grief and trauma when we are faced with seemingly endless rounds of uncertainty, doubt, and fear?

The COVID-19 pandemic has been identified as a significant factor in the deterioration of mental health in children, but the long-term effects of COVID-19 on children's mental health has yet to be seen.