Abstract
The advances in the treatment of agoraphobia made since 1970 and the adoption of the new techniques by practitioners stand as a gratifying example of the potential benefits to be gained from persisting with clinical research, difficult though it be. By 1981 Barlow and Wolfe were able to report that across treatment centers 65 to 75% of agoraphobic clients were found to improve with fairly brief behavioral treatment. Prior to the advent of active therapies for this problem, agoraphobia tended to be a lifelong disabling disorder, from which Roberts (1964) found only 24% to recover with standard interventions. There is enough known about agoraphobia in 1984 to fill an entire volume; in fact, two have been written on the subject for professional audiences (Chambless & Goldstein, 1982; Mathews, Gelder, & Johnston, 1981). Because all of this material cannot be compacted into one chapter, the focus in this paper will be on those aspects of our knowledge most pertinent to service providers. The reader expecting to practice heavily in this area or to perform research on this topic would do well to consult these more extensive works.
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Chambless, D.L. (1985). Agoraphobia. In: Hersen, M., Bellack, A.S. (eds) Handbook of Clinical Behavior Therapy with Adults. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2427-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2427-0_3
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