Talk:Systematic desensitization

message: "Systematic desensitization is sometimes called graduated exposure therapy."
On my understanding systematic desensitisation and exposure are essentially different things.  According to Wolpe, desensitisation involves imagining anxiety-stimuli while maintaining enough relaxation to inhibit anxiety completely, or almost completely, at each step on the hierarchy.  Exposure therapy, by contrast, involves exposure to the imagined anxiety-stimuli which, when relaxation is used, may be accompanied by enough relaxation to reduce anxiety but necessarily suppress it completely.
HypnoSynthesis 11:42, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Untitled 

message: I had a really hard time parsing this sentence. I understand that it may have been written by a non-native English speaker, but it's not only the grammar that I have an issue with. A study involving only 4 subjects does not "prove" the hypothesis.  Maybe you could just talk about the results and what they hint at.
I tried rewriting the paragraph for clarity, but I wasn't sure if I was changing the intent of the original author.  Here's how far I got:
Although the ability to relax is a prerequisite for systematic desensitization to work, it is not the only factor. A study of the contribution and importance of muscle relaxation to systematic desensitization therapy in four different phobic patients was undertaken. [How was this study done?  2 test patients and 2 control patients?  Or do all 4 try systematic desensitization both with and without relaxation?]  In the control phase, there was little or no difference in the patients' improvement. In two cases, when measured by self-evaluation, removing relaxation slowed the progress through the hierarchy, as well as slowing the therapeutic progress; however the overall effects were very small. The study hints that other variables are important to the therapeutic effectiveness of desensitization. One potential variable is the ability to visualize the process of relaxation and combine it with muscle relaxation. Putting together visualization and relaxation of feared scenes helps certain individuals to attack their feared object or scenario in imagination, and may push them to attack it in reality as well.
Justin Mauger (talk) 03:55, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The paragraph you discuss definitely needs rework. I am also proposing to delete the entire reference to "4 phobic patients." There are no citations and no sources listed. But even if sourced, why is this particular study relevant here? Sounds like a POV is being expressed here. Note, there are hundreds of peer-reviewed studies on systematic desensitization, exposure based therapies, etc. and I would suggest culling some literature to find recent meta-studies of scientific relevance. 4 phobic patients is far too limited a number to constitute a credible study. (There are contemporary clinicians who have pioneered state of the art desensitization-based therapies for anxiety---see Ost's work from Europe---so I don't think the the jury is completely decided yet). In any case, I would be glad to rewrite the paragraph if no one else wishes to.Ronsword (talk) 06:19, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Paragraph on effect of relaxation 

message: I removed this entire section. The reasons for removing is that it contains claims that simply cannot be true. "Systematic desensitization can also be used successfully to treat drug abuse." The source stating this is a primary study from 1972. The next paragraph describes a case study done in 1974. Actually, if systematic desensitization was successful in treating drug abuse, there would be lots and lots of secondary and tertiary sources writing about it. These sources would also be more recent than the seventies. So, if anyone feels like writing a new section on "Systematic desensitization and substance abuse" (which would be interesting), please read WP:MEDRS and use good sources! Lova Falk talk 10:11, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Systematic desensitization and substance abuse 

message: This section reads more as an instruction section than as an encyclopedic one. To improve this section, what would be needed is a review of studies that evaluate systematic desensitization for test anxiety. Is there any evidence that systematic desensitization helps? And if yes, better than other treatment methods? The section would need to give this kind of information rather than how-to instructions. Lova Falk talk 10:20, 2 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Test anxiety