Open Trial of a Personalized Modular Treatment for Mood and Anxiety

Psychosocial treatments for mood and anxiety disorders are generally effective, however, a number of treated individuals fail to demonstrate clinically-significant change. Consistent the decades-old aim to identify ‘what works for whom,’ personalized and precision treatments have become a recent area of interest in medicine and psychology. The present study followed the recommendations of Fisher (2015) to employ a personalized modular model of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Employing the algorithms provided by Fernandez, Fisher, and Chi (2017), the present study collected intensive repeated measures data prior to therapy in order to perform person-specific factor analyses and dynamic factor models. The results of these analyses were then used to generated personalized modular treatment plans on a person-by-person basis. Thirty-two participants completed therapy. The average number of sessions was 10.38. Hedges g’s for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) and Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HARS) were 2.33 and 1.62, respectively. The change per unit time was g=.24/session for the HRSD and g=.17/session for the HARS. The current open trial provides promising data in support of personalization, modularization, and idiographic research paradigms.