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Anxiety and depression are very prevalent in primary care, with high rates of chronic cases, comorbidity and lost quality of life, along with huge economic costs. The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) project, launched in the United Kingdom in 2007, has become an international benchmark for the treatment of common mental disorders. In Spain, Psicofundación developed the PsicAP clinical trial, following the precedent set by the IAPT.This study reviews and compares and contrasts the methods, results, and contributions of the IAPT and PsicAP.The IAPT is a project for the pragmatic implementation of evidence-based psychological therapies in primary care. PsicAP is a randomized clinical trial whose results demonstrated that adding a psychological treatment (seven group sessions of transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioural therapy) to treatment-as-usual (TAU) for anxiety and depression in the primary care setting was more effective and cost-effective than TAU alone. The therapeutic gains and the cost-effectiveness were maintained at a 12 months follow-up. Moreover, the percentage of reliably recovered patients was comparable to the numbers from the IAPT.This brief psychological treatment should be implemented in the Spanish public health system, similar to the precedent set by the IAPT initiative.

Evidence-Based Psychological Treatments for Adults: A Selective Review.Psychological treatments have shown their efficacy, effectiveness, and efficiency in dealing with mental disorders. However, considering the scientific knowledge generated in recent years, in the Spanish context, there are no updating studies about empirically supported psychological treatments. The main goal was to carry out a selective review of the main empirically supported psychological treatments for mental disorders in adults.Levels of evidence and degrees of recommendation were collected based on the criteria proposed by the Spanish National Health System (Clinical Practice Guidelines) for different psychological disorders.The results indicate that psychological treatments have empirical support for the approach to a wide range of psychological disorders. These levels of empirical evidence gathered range from low to high depending on the psychological disorder analysed. The review indicates the existence of certain fields of intervention that need further investigation.Based on this selective review, psychology professionals will be able to have rigorous, up-to-date information that allows them to make informed decisions when implementing empirically based psychotherapeutic procedures based on the characteristics of the people who require help.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is highly prevalent in the Spanish primary care (PC) setting and the leading cause of disability in Spain. The aim of this study was to evaluate several key psychometric properties of the Sheehan Disability Scale (SDS) in patients with or without MDD and varying degrees of symptom severity using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9).A total of 1,704 PC patients participating in the PsicAP clinical trial completed the SDS and PHQ-9. We evaluated the factor structure, measurement invariance across gender, internal consistency, and the discriminative and predictive validity.Confirmatory factor analyses revealed a unifactorial model of the SDS containing 4 items (SDS-4) with the best model fit (CFI: .99; GFI: .99; TLI: 96; RMSEA: .10). This model contained the three life domain items (work, family, and social life) plus perceived stress (PS) with significant loadings. The internal consistency of the SDS-4 was acceptable in patients with or without MDD, regardless of symptom severity. The SDS-4 also showed good discriminative capacity and acceptable predictive validity in all subsamples.These findings support the use of the SDS-4 to assess depression-related disability in patients at Spanish primary care centres.

Scientific literature shows that anxiety is an important factor in eating disorders. The aim of this case-control study was to compare the anxiety manifestations obtained by means of the Anxiety Situations and Responses Inventory of in a clinical sample of 74 females (46, anorexia nervosa; 28, bulimia) to those obtained by a control group (130 girls without disorders). The between-group ANOVA results showed higher anxiety scores in the clinical group with a medium effect size for the anxiety trait, finding a flat profile (within-group ANOVA) for the three response systems (cognitive, physiological and motor) and the four specific anxiety traits (test, interpersonal, phobic, and daily life situations). Moreover, high scores in anxiety involved a greater risk of being diagnosed with an eating disorder in the 8 bivariate comparisons. The estimations were more precise for cognitive anxiety and for the specific interpersonal anxiety trait.

Over the past years, several authors have used voluntary hyperventilation as a method for inducing physiological arousal and the experience of anxiety. The purpose of this investigation is to analyze the relationship between the process of arousal and the experience of anxiety. In order to induce anxiety, two tasks were assigned: hyperventilating and preparing a speech. General hypothesis tested: hyperventilation will induce a high level of physiological arousal (heart rate and skin conductance) with a limited experience of anxiety (subjective appraisal of valence, intensity, and control), whereas preparing a speech will generate a high level of arousal and a significant increase in the experience of anxiety. A sample of 89 women was divided into two groups (n=45 and n=44). After matching the two groups in various anxiety parameters, both tasks were carried out in a different order by each group in the laboratory. Results obtained confirm the main hypothesis and provide evidence against the use of hyperventilation as a technique for generating anxious experience.