Alcohol use behavior is broadly associated with romantic relationship functioning. Problems with alcohol use may strain romantic relationships and relationship conflict may trigger alcohol use. On the other hand, supportive partners and well-functioning relationships are associated with improved treatment outcomes for alcohol use disorder (AUD). Alcohol Behavioral Couple Therapy (ABCT) is designed to treat individual alcohol use problems by addressing the interpersonal patterns that maintain drinking while enhancing relationship functioning. This webinar will explore the role of romantic partners in alcohol use treatment and provide an overview of ABCT techniques.

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU), a negative dispositional characteristic that results from catastrophic beliefs about uncertainty, is a key vulnerability factor for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Research has shown that IU is highly related to the symptoms of GAD, that the relationship between IU and GAD is not accounted for by other vulnerability factors, and that changes in IU precede and predict corresponding changes in the symptoms of GAD. In this webinar, I will present a new, highly focused treatment for GAD: Behavioural Experiments for Intolerance of Uncertainty. The treatment draws upon 30 years of research on the role of intolerance of uncertainty in GAD, as well as on recent theorizing on the mechanisms of fear reduction. In brief, the new treatment uses the structure of behavioural experiments to explicitly test client hypotheses and thus enhance new learning during exposure to uncertainty. The treatment has now been tested in two clinical trials, with results showing that it promotes impressive change in negative beliefs about uncertainty, the symptoms of GAD and general psychopathology. The goal of this workshop is to present the new treatment’s underlying theory and to illustrate its strategies and procedures.

The discrepancy between need and access to mental health services is uncontestable. An estimated 57% to 67% of adults experiencing mental illness in the United States do not receive needed services. The need-to-access gap is even wider for children and adolescents: Up to 80% of youths with mental health needs go without services each year. Even among those who do access care, treatment is often brief: international service-use data suggests that the modal number of sessions attended is just one. This creates a need to quantify and capitalize on what can be accomplished therapeutically, given appropriate targeting and structure, in a short period of time. Therefore, this talk will outline recent innovations in single-session interventions (SSIs) for mental health problems, including the evidence supporting their effects; how they might yield clinically-meaningful change; resources for delivering evidence-based SSIs; and where, when, and how they can be delivered. Understanding SSIs’ promise creates an opportunity for a paradigm shift in our field’s thinking about constructing services for broad-scale impact. SSIs can operate as stand-alone services or as adjunctive services within existing care systems; as such, learning to study and provide SSIs may improve the reach of effective mental health interventions while mitigating problems linked to long waiting lists, global provider shortages, and high costs of traditional care.

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is the most common gastrointestinal (GI) disorder seen by primary care and GI physicians, accounts for considerable personal suffering, and is largely refractory to medical therapies. Its physical symptoms (pain, diarrhea and/or constipation) commonly co-occur with other psychological complaints (e. g. GAD, depression) that behavior therapists effectively treat and thus offer a gratifying way of expanding one’s clinical practice. In the absence of any organic cause, IBS is best understood from a biopsychosocial perspective (Van Oudenhove et al., 2016, Gastroenterology) that emphasizes the reciprocal and interactive relationship among a person’s biology (e. g., GI motility, pain sensitivity, stress reactivity), behaviors (e. g., avoidance), and higher order central processes (rigid cognitive style characterized by perseverative thought manifested in restricted coping and perceptual biases to threat) that influence GI symptoms. Clinical trials assessing the efficacy of CBT for IBS have established it as a gold standard psychological treatment, yielding dramatic, rapid, broad, and sustained symptom improvement that compares favorably to pharmacological or dietary treatments (Mayer, 2007, New England Journal of Medicine). After a brief overview of IBS, this workshop will describe the conceptual underpinnings of CBT for IBS, its rationale, goals and technical components using didactic instruction and detailed case examples from actual patients enrolled in a landmark NIH trial (Lackner, Jaccard, et al., Gastroenterology, 2018) that affirmed CBT’s status as the most widely endorsed empirically validated psychological treatment (Black. et al., GUT, 2020) and arguably the most effective behavioral treatment for any chronic pain disorder. Attendees will learn practical strategies to trouble shoot around difficult clinical issues to maximize outcome, patient engagement, and clinician satisfaction.