hypnotherapy and anxiety

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issues recommendations for NHS treatments based on a thorough assessment of clinical trials. In their Guideline no 22 issued in 2007, CBT is recommended as the treatment of choice for general anxiety.

A clinical trial of CBT with 134 older adults of average age 67 suffering from anxiety showed that CBT significantly improved worry severity, depressive symptoms and general mental health. Patients were assessed and showed improvement for up to a year after treatment. The study was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2009 (JAMA 2009)

The use of CBT for treating children and adolescents with anxiety disorders was reviewed by the School of Medicine and Temple University, New York, in 2002 and reported in the International Review of Psychiatry. One clinical trial involved 47 children aged 8-13. Two thirds of these no longer met the criteria of anxiety disorder after treatment and this improvement was maintained after 5 years. In a second trial of 94 children aged 9-13, all showed significant reductions in severity of symptoms after treatment with one half no longer meeting the criteria for anxiety disorder. The review noted that failure to intervene early with effective treatments may render children affected with anxiety vulnerable to impairment of his or her long term emotional development

The department of Psychology of Boston University in 2008 conducted a thorough review of no fewer than 27 different clinical trials of the effect of CBT treatment for anxiety. They concluded that CBT was indeed an efficacious treatment for this condition significantly better than placebo treatments. The review was reported in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 2008

The Boston University Review described above also concluded that further improvement in treatment outcome was desirable when using CBT for anxiety.
This could well be achieved by using hypnosis in conjunction with CBT. An earlier study of 42 adults with severe anxiety around public speaking showed that CBT combined with Hypnotherapy produced a substantial average increase in improvement compared with CBT alone.