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Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Amsterdam
GGz-Groningen-Zuid,Groningen, The Netherlands
Correspondence: Professor Paul M.G. Emmelkamp,University of Amsterdam, Department of Clinical Psychology, Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Email: P.M.G.Emmelkamp{at}uva.nl
Funding detailed in Acknowledgements.
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ABSTRACT |
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Aims To compare the effectiveness of brief dynamic therapy and cognitive-behavioural therapy as out-patient treatment for people with avoidant personality disorder.
Method Patients who metthe criteria for avoidant personality disorder (n=62) were randomly assigned to 20 weekly sessions of either brief dynamic therapy (n=23) or cognitive-behavioural therapy (n=21), or they were assigned to the waiting-listcontrolgroup (n=18). After the waiting period, patients in the control group were randomly assigned to one of the two therapies.
Results Patients who received cognitive-behavioural therapy showed significantly more improvements on a number of measures in comparison with those who had brief dynamic psychotherapyor wereinthe waiting-list control group. Results were maintained at follow-up.
Conclusions Cognitive-behavioural therapyis more effective than waiting-list control and brief dynamic therapy. Brief dynamic therapy was no better than the waiting-listcontrol condition.
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INTRODUCTION |
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Our study was designed to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of brief dynamic therapy and cognitive-behavioural therapy for patients with avoidant personality disorder as their primary problem. Given the overlap of traits in cluster C personality disorders (van Velzen & Emmelkamp, 1999), we were interested not only in the results of treatment on avoidance and social distress but also in whether treatment effects generalised to dependent and obsessive-compulsive traits.
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METHOD |
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Of the 114 patients who consented to possible inclusion in the trial, 49 did not meet the entry criteria and 3 refused to participate. The reasons for exclusion were as follows:
This left 62 patients for inclusion in the trial. The sample (30 men, 32 women) ranged in age from 24 years to 61 years (mean=34.3, s.d.=8.9). Educational level ranged from elementary (14%), medium (24%), above average (36%) to high (26%). Patients were randomly assigned to cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT; n=21), brief dynamic therapy (BDT; n=23) or a waiting-list control group (n=18). Patients in the control group were randomly assigned to receive one of the therapies (CBT, n=18, BDT, n=8) after the waiting period (Fig. 1).
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Treatments
Treatment consisted of 20 sessions over a 6-month period. Individual
treatment sessions, each lasting 45 min, were scheduled once a week. Both
treatment approaches were manual-guided.
Cognitive-behavioural therapy
Cognitive-behavioural therapy is based on the assumption that anxiety and
avoidance are related to individuals' maladaptive beliefs and related thought
processes. The model emphasises collaborative interactions between patient and
therapist in conjunction with specific cognitive and behavioural techniques
such as Socratic dialogue, monitoring of beliefs, analysing advantages and
disadvantages of avoidance, activity monitoring and scheduling, graded
exposure assignments, behavioural experiments and role-play
(Beck & Freeman, 1990;
Emmelkamp et al,
1992).
Brief dynamic therapy
Brief dynamic therapy is based on the assumption that anxiety and avoidance
are related to individuals' unconscious psychodynamic conflicts, in addition
to which shame has a major role. Treatment was directed at defence and affect
restructuring. The model emphasises a therapeutic alliance on the basis of
which the most essential unconscious conflict can be clarified and resolved
with the help of expressive techniques such as clarification, confrontation
and, especially, interpretation (Malan,
1976,
1979). However, in a number of
cases a more supportive attitude and technique was used to bolster threatened
equilibrium and relieve the consequences of unconscious conflict by means of
methods such as suggestion, reassurance and encouragement (primarily
supportive mode) (Luborsky,
1984; Luborsky & Mark,
1991; Pinsker et al,
1991). In these instances the therapist clarifies rather than
confronts defences in order to regulate rather than to provoke anxiety.
Waiting-list control
Patients in the control condition received no therapy between the initial
assessment and the post-treatment assessment 20 weeks later.
Assessment
Diagnoses were derived using the SCID-II, completed by an independent
clinician (a psychologist). The SCID-II was limited to the subset of
personality disorders that screened positive on the PDQ-4. Our primary outcome
measures were SCID-II diagnosis by an independent assessor at the 6-month
follow-up, and self-report measures completed by the patients at three time
points: pre-treatment, immediately post-treatment and 6 months after the
treatment was completed. Self-report measures included the Personality
Disorder Belief Questionnaire (PDBQ; Arntz
et al, 2004) avoidant personality sub-scale; the Lehrer
Woolfolk Anxiety Symptoms Questionnaire (LWASQ;
Scholing & Emmelkamp,
1992); the social phobia sub-scale of the Social Phobia Anxiety
Inventory (SPAI; Beidel et al,
1989); and the Avoidance Scale, consisting of five idiosyncratic
situations which were avoided pre-treatment
(Emmelkamp, 1982). To assess
whether treatment applied to other personality traits from the cluster C
domain, participants also completed the PDBQ dependent and
obsessive-compulsive sub-scales.
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RESULTS |
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=0.1 was
set for the analyses in the between-group comparisons. Six patients in total withdrew before the post-treatment assessment: two from the control group, one who never started treatment (from the CBT group), two who discontinued treatment prematurely from the CBT group and one with missing data (BDT group). In one case (CBT) treatment had to be continued between the post-treatment and follow-up assessments, which meant the data could not be used in the follow-up analysis. Five patients (two from the CBT group and three from the BDT group) did not show up for the follow-up assessment, and in the BDT group follow-up questionnaires were missing for two patients, leaving 46 cases for follow-up analyses.
The mean actual number of therapy sessions was 18.5 (range 14-20) in the CBT group and 18.8 (range 13-20) in the BDT group.
Within-group differences
Results of treatment are shown in Table
1. Both intervention therapies as first treatment led to
significant improvement on all primary outcome measure (PDBQ avoidant
sub-scale, LWASQ, SPAI social phobia sub-scale and Avoidance Scale) and on the
generalisation measure PDBQ dependent sub-scale. In addition,
cognitive-behavioural therapy led to significant improvement on the PDBQ
obsessive-compulsive sub-scale. Control group patients significantly improved
between pre-treatment and post-treatment assessments on the SPAI social phobia
sub-scale and the Avoidance Scale. The effect sizes that were computed mirror
this pattern of changes. According to Cohen
(1977), effect sizes of 0.20,
0.50 and 0.80 may be considered to correspond to small, medium and large
effects respectively. According to this rule of thumb, the effect sizes of
cognitive-behavioural therapy are large on five out of six measures, the
effects of brief dynamic therapy are generally medium to large, and the
effects of the control condition are small to medium (apart from the Avoidance
Scale measure, for which the effect size can be considered large).
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Treatment v. no treatment
Analyses of covariance to assess differences between CBT (n=18)
and BDT (n=22) v. control (n=16) revealed that CBT
was significantly superior to the control condition on primary outcome
measures PDBQ avoidant sub-scale (F(1,52)=7.39,
P=0.01) and Avoidance Scale (F(1,46)=5.39,
P=0.02). No significant difference was found between BDT and
control.
CBT v. BDT post-treatment
Analyses of covariance to assess differences between CBT (n=26)
and BDT (n=28) revealed that CBT was significantly superior to BDT on
all primary outcome measures: PDBQ avoidant sub-scale
(F(1,51)=5.92, P=0.02), LWASQ
(F(1,51)=5.69, P=0.02), SPAI social phobia
sub-scale (F(1,51)=2.98, P=0.09) and Avoidance
Scale (F(1,45)=5.25, P=0.03), and on the
generalisation measure PDBQ obsessive-compulsive sub-scale
(F(1,51)=10.84, P=0.002). On none of the measures
was BDT superior to CBT.
CBT v. BDT at follow-up
In the period between post-treatment assessment and follow-up, no treatment
took place. A comparison between the post-treatment and follow-up scores for
CBT (n=23) and BDT (n=23) groups revealed that results were
maintained. Only brief dynamic therapy resulted in significant improvement on
the PDBQ obsessive-compulsive scale (t(22)=2.14,
P=0.04).
Analyses of covariance to assess differences between CBT and BDT at follow-up revealed that CBT was significantly superior to BDT on the PDBQ avoidant sub-scale (F(1,40)=5.96, P=0.02), PDBQ obsessive-compulsive sub-scale (F(1,44)=5.95, P=0.02) and PDBQ dependent sub-scale (F(1,44)=6.144, P=0.02).
At follow-up, patients were reassessed with the SCID-II. In the CBT group 2
out of 22 patients (9%) and in the BDT group 9 out of 25 patients (36%) still
fulfilled the criteria for avoidant personality disorder. The difference was
statistically significant (
2=4.73, P=0.03).
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DISCUSSION |
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At follow-up, improvements within patient groups were stable: some patients improved between the post-treatment assessment and follow-up, whereas others relapsed slightly. At follow-up, the difference in effectiveness between the two therapies was still seen: cognitive-behavioural therapy was found to be significantly superior to brief dynamic therapy on four out of seven measures. On follow-up, the SCID-II test showed that only 9% of the CBT group were still classed as having avoidant personality disorder, whereas 36% of the BDT group still fulfilled the diagnostic criteria. This was a significant difference. This finding is of considerable clinical interest, given that of all the personality disorders the avoidant type is found to be the most persistent (Shea et al, 2002), even tending to worsen over time (Seivewright et al, 2002). In the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders study (Shea et al, 2002), 67% of patients with avoidant disorder still fulfilled the criteria for this disorder at 6-month follow-up, despite the fact that most patients had received clinical care. The reduction in disorder in our study of 64% in the BDT group is substantial and that of 91% in the CBT group is very substantial in comparison with the 33% reduction in the study by Shea et al (2002).
Results of brief dynamic therapy in our study were statistically significant with effect sizes ranging from medium to large, but were less than those achieved with cognitive-behavioural therapy. It should be noted, however, that the results of the latter therapy on self-report measures were also modest. It is unclear whether prolonged treatment would have resulted in superior results. Other studies investigating brief dynamic psychotherapy (Winston et al, 1994; Svartberg et al, 2004) usually involved 40 sessions. Whether prolonging therapy after 20 sessions would enhance the effectiveness of treatment needs to be investigated.
To date, few studies have evaluated the effects of (cognitive) behavioural therapy in patients with avoidant personality disorder. Our study supports earlier studies that evaluated behavioural treatments in patients classified as having this disorder (Alden, 1989; Renneberg et al, 1990; Stravinsky et al, 1994). The behavioural treatments investigated in these studies included social skills training and exposure to real-life social situations, but none looked at cognitive therapy. Whether cognitive therapy enhances the effects of behavioural therapy deserves further study.
In interpreting the findings of our study, several limitations should be considered. The first limitation was engendered by the need to balance methodological and ethical concerns. More specifically, for ethical reasons it was decided that patients assigned to the waiting-list control group could not be denied treatment for longer than the 20-week waiting period. This meant we were not able to assess the long-term effects of the intervention therapies in comparison with this control group. Moreover, all patients in the waiting-list group knew that they would eventually receive treatment, which might have influenced results at the post-treatment assessment. The (limited) improvements seen in the control group might be related to the positive effect of expectancy and hope.
Given the large number of therapists (n=16) involved in this study, results are likely to generalise to other community mental health settings. However, it should be noted that the therapists were experts in their respective forms of psychotherapy. Furthermore, they were selected and trained for this project and supervised during the study. Consequently, it is unknown whether our findings would apply to untrained therapists working in other kinds of community setting.
In summary, our results suggest that cognitive-behavioural therapy is superior to waiting-list control and brief dynamic therapy. There was no evidence that brief dynamic therapy was more effective than the waiting-list control. Given the high prevalence of avoidant personality disorder in the community (Torgersen et al, 2001), the persistence of the disorder (Shea et al, 2002) and the high level of functional impairment associated with the disorder (van Velzen et al, 2000; Skodol et al, 2002), our findings on the effectiveness of different types of therapy for this condition provide an important step forward for community mental healthcare.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
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Received for publication April 13, 2005. Revision received October 11, 2005. Accepted for publication October 27, 2005.
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