Transdiagnostic CBT for Anxiety and Depressive Disorders

Transdiagnostic approaches to treatment offer the potential of a more parsimonious approach to the treatment of co-occurring disorders, which represent the norm rather than the exception in clinical practice. Transdiagnostic approaches to treatment focus on addressing common shared mechanisms that cut across diagnostic criteria and represent core underlying features of anxiety, depressive, and related disorders and contribute to diagnosis-based symptom presentations. In this chapter, we discuss the rationale behind the development of transdiagnostic CBT. We present various measures designed to assess and track core mechanisms contributing to transdiagnostic symptom sequelae. We then present the core components of the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders (UP), a pioneering treatment developed by Barlow et al. (Unified protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders, 2010; Unified protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders: therapist guide. Oxford University Press, New York, 2017) to specifically target common core deficits in emotion processing and regulation common across anxiety and depressive disorders. Finally, we illustrate the application of the UP through the presentation of a case example.