The Responsibility Pie Chart exercise is designed to guide clients through the process of clarifying and re-evaluating their responsibility for negative events. The goal is not to exempt the client from responsibility, or downplay accountability when warranted, but rather to foster a more balanced and reality-oriented perspective.

This week we’re releasing 7 new German translations from our popular Cognitive Distortions Series. Translated resources include: All-Or-Nothing Thinking, Arbitrary Inference, Catastrophizing, Disqualifying Others, Disqualifying The Positive, and Unhelpful Thinking Styles (Common and Extended versions). 

Last week, we sat down with Professor David H. Barlow to talk all things Unified Protocol. In this article, Dr Barlow shares some of the interesting history behind the inspiration and development of the Unified Protocol, as well as his perspective on the main benefits of this approach for both clinicians and clients.

It is not unexpected that greater use of a helpful skill can lead to further improvements, but findings like this are a useful reminder – both for therapists and for clients.

The Unified Protocol (UP) consists of five core modules which teach specific skills to be used between sessions. In this secondary data analysis of a 2021 RCT of the UP in adults without at least one anxiety or depressive disorder, Matthew Southward and Shannon Sauer-Savala assessed ‘skillfullness’ according to: whether clients understood the skills they had learned, how often they used the skills, how well they used the skills, and how effective the skills were.

This paper asks the key question: is a transdiagnostic psychological treatment, the Unified Protocol, at least as effective as various well-established single-disorder protocols in the treatment of anxiety disorders?

The results from this RCT suggest that it is. The authors found that the UP produced similar reductions in the severity of several different anxiety disorders to single-disorder CBT protocols (SDP), both acutely and after 6 months. If the UP can produce comparable results to diagnosis-specific treatment protocols, then it could be a more efficient approach for care providers, facilitating wider access to treatment.

This paper sought to evaluate whether the treatment gains reported at post-treatment in the previous study were maintained at the 36-month follow up. The researchers found that the similar effects of the UP and SDP treatment approaches were largely maintained after 36 months, further highlighting the utility of transdiagnostic approaches in the treatment of commonly occurring emotional disorders.