Dr. Deborah Beidel in the news
Dr. Deborah Beidel, UCF Clinical Psychology Professor, is in the news again for her anxiety disorder clinic.
Funded by the Department of Defense, the UCF Anxiety Disorders Clinic provides free behavioral therapy for all veterans who were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and are suffering from PTSD.
Dr. Deborah Beidel, Trauma Management Therapy Program director, said that although the clinic is collecting data, behavioral therapy is not a new treatment.
“Behavior therapy is the most studied and, what we call, empirically supported — meaning it has the most data behind it — treatment for anxiety disorders,” Beidel said. “It’s more effective than medication, and it’s more effective than talk therapy.”
The clinic also acts as a teaching environment.
“One of the reasons we have the clinic here is not only to provide services but also to train graduate students how to do this treatment,” Beidel said. “So then the graduate students can go out to other places and disseminate this treatment. There are not a lot of people, so far, who have been trained in behavior therapy and exposure therapy.”