Clinical trials

There has been growing awareness of the importance of death anxiety (DA) in pathological anxiety. DA is defined as a persistent and unreasonable fear of death and thoughts, fears, and emotions associated with the end of life. DA has been suggested as a core fear that underpins the emergence and perseverance of numerous anxiety disorders. However, previous DA-based treatment studies focus on the elderly, the patients, or health professionals who care for the terminally ill. Therefore, there is a need to examine the effect of psychological interventions on DA and current disorder symptoms in a clinical sample through randomized controlled trials. The current study aims to develop a novel Religiously Integrated Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (RCBT)-based intervention on DA in individuals diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and to compare the effectiveness of RCBT-based intervention with classical CBT-based intervention.

The transdiagnostic approach argues that the common features are needed to be taken into account \[e.g. distress intolerance (DI), intolerance of uncertainty (IU), worry)\] underlying emotional disorders rather than evaluating them separately due to the fact that the dissection of anxiety disorders has increased with each emerging version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in which the classification of anxiety disorders resulted in an increased number of intervention protocols for each disorder. This also caused an increase of comorbidity among anxiety disorders. Transdiagnostic approach offers a unified protocol (UP) for strengthening the common features, and thereby both preventing the emergence of emotional disorders or intervening the symptom severity of emotional disorders, which can be applied to different types of emotional disorders. The main aim of this study is to develop a UP which is planned to be applied as a group therapy. The UP will include interventions developing the levels of common transdiagnostic features (DI, IU and worry). The study's second aim is to investigate the effect of the developed UP on DI, IU and worry. The third one is to search the effect of the developed UP on symptom severity levels of anxiety disorders. Fourthly, this study will search if the levels of transdiagnostic common features (DI, IU and worry) will predict the levels of symptom severity of anxiety disorders'.