Research groups at Miyazaki University and Chiba University have shown in clinical trials that "cognitive behavioral therapy" is effective for patients with "social anxiety" who do not improve with antidepressants.
"Social anxiety disorder" is a mental illness whose main symptom is "significant anxiety and fear that occurs when interacting with people", and that fear limits daily life such as schoolwork and occupation.Despite the third highest prevalence of mental illness, it is easily misunderstood that it is a personality problem, and it is also characterized by the fact that the number of people who see a medical institution is as low as about 3%.Symptoms rarely improve spontaneously without treatment, and the amount of labor loss associated with "social anxiety" is estimated to exceed one trillion yen annually.
Although drug therapy with antidepressants has become the global standard for the treatment of "social anxiety", 7 to 8% of patients do not show sufficient improvement with antidepressant treatment, so the following is effective. There was an urgent need to establish a new treatment method.
A research group led by Professor Naoki Yoshinaga of Miyazaki University and Professor Eiji Shimizu of Chiba University conducted the world's first "cognitive behavioral therapy *" for social anxiety that does not improve with antidepressants, and its effectiveness was clarified by clinical trials. I made it.The 42 target patients were divided into two groups, the "conventional treatment group" and the "concomitant cognitive-behavioral therapy with conventional treatment". %.“Remission”, in which symptoms almost disappeared, was 2% with conventional treatment and 10% with cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Based on the results of this research, social anxiety disorder has been added to the target diseases of "cognitive behavioral therapy" in the medical fee revision in 2016.The results of the research were published in the online bulletin version on May 2016, 5 in the European medical journal "Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics".
* "Cognitive-behavioral therapy" is a psychotherapy that seeks ways to get out of trouble while working on "cognition (how to receive things and ways of thinking)" and "behavior" regarding life problems that patients have.
