Transdiagnostic cognitive behavioural therapy

In 1999, while a young doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln under the tutelage of Professor Debra Hope, I began working on the framework of what would become my dissertation. The seeds for this idea were planted a year earlier by a fellow lab member, and now Associate Professor, Melanie VanDyke, and involved treating individuals with different anxiety disorder diagnoses together using the same cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) group protocol. However, this idea was quite heretical as it deviated from the established idea that each of the DSM-IV anxiety disorder diagnoses was distinct (although related). This point was quite firmly noted by more than a few manuscript and grant application reviewers at the time. Even so, the dissertation project, a small randomised controlled trial (RCT) comparing this new transdiagnostic CBT against waitlist control, was completed in 2002, defended in 2003, and published in 2005 after convincing enough anonymous manuscript reviewers and journal editors that it was not a completely terrible idea after all (Norton & Hope, Citation2005).