Current status of psychotherapeutic interventions for social phobia

Abstract

Psychotherapeutic interventions, especially the cognitive-behavioral psychotherapies, have been well studied as treatments for social phobia. The purposes of this article are to (1) enumerate and describe the varieties of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) that have been applied to the treatment of social phobia, (2) provide a meta-analytic overview of the efficacy of these approaches, (3) examine the relative utility of CBT versus that of pharmacotherapy for social phobia, (4) examine the potential utility of multidisciplinary approaches to treatment, and (5) discuss possible future directions in the development of psychotherapeutic strategies for the treatment of social phobia, including the use of computers as adjunctive tools.