Current Status of Psychotherapeutic Interventions for Social Phobia

Psychotherapeutic interventions, especially the cognitive-behavioral psychotherapies, have beenwell studied as treatments for social phobia. The purposes of this article are to (1) enumerate and describethe varieties of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) that have been applied to the treatment ofsocial phobia, (2) provide a meta-analytic overview of the efficacy of these approaches, (3) examinethe relative utility of CBT versus that of pharmacotherapy for social phobia, (4) examine the potentialutility of multidisciplinary approaches to treatment, and (5) discuss possible future directions in thedevelopment of psychotherapeutic strategies for the treatment of social phobia, including the use ofcomputers as adjunctive tools.