A medication that enhances learning, taken just before a psychotherapy or counseling therapy session, may aid cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for anxiety disorders, say The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)funded researchers, who adapted the technique from studies in rats.
D-cycloserine, is used to “specifically enhance the efficacy of the emotional learning process that takes place in psychotherapy and hopefully make these new emotional memories more robust and long-lasting,”
Source: American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP).
Barbara Rothbaum, Ph.D., an NIMH grantee at Emory University heralded the new approach as “a paradigm shift.”
D-cycloserine enhanced psychotherapy has been found effective for social phobia in two studies, and for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in two out of three studies, according to Rothbaum.
D-cycloserine is currently being tested on Iraq veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), via enhanced virtual reality based exposure therapy.
