Jacqueline Sperling, PhD, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, and co-program director of the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program, led a study investigating the sustainability of outcomes from an intensive group and family-based outpatient cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT) program, that included a hybrid of in-person and virtual treatment sessions for children and adolescents with anxiety disorders and/or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Her research, which was published last month in Current Developmental Disorders Reports, suggests that an intensive hybrid format may offer lasting gains even after children have finished treatment. In addition to Sperling, other McLean authors include Abigail Stark, PhD, Esther Tung, PhD and R.
Meredith Elkins, PhD. Sperling describes her team's research and how the COVID-19 pandemic spurred this investigation into virtual components of child and adolescent mental health treatment. What led you to explore this area of research? Our previous research has demonstrated that intensive group and family-based outpatient CBT can yield improvements in symptoms and functional impairment for children with anxiety and OCD using either in-person or virtual formats, with no significant differences between the two.
For this new study, we wanted to see whether a hybrid format of both in-person and virtual treatment sessions not only could demonstrate similar outcomes, but also could offer lasting gains .