Results of Systematic Desensitization with Phobias Re-examined

¹ Senior Lecturer, School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Controlled studies of desensitization with phobic patients are re-examined. There is a consistent trend for half the subjects treated with desensitization to show marked improvement, whereas only a quarter of control subjects treated with other therapies do so. This trend could rarely result in a statistically significant difference with the number of patients used in these studies. The danger of ignoring valuable therapeutic effects because they do not reach statistical significance, or of over-interpreting findings which do, is again stressed. The evidence from these studies and from those with phobic students suggests that at follow-up patients with agoraphobia show a better response to behaviour therapy than do those with more specific phobias.