Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a commonly diagnosed mental illnesses that can have profound effects on a professional, personal, and social level. Its main feature is excessive, uncontrollable worry about a number of events or activities occurring more days than not for at least six months. An empirically-supported cognitive behavioural treatment (CBT) protocol has been developed based on a cognitive model of GAD that centres around intolerance of uncertainty. However, not all treated individuals achieve full remission of their disorder for reasons that have not been conclusively established. A potential barrier to effective GAD treatment may be symptoms of depression. Depressive symptoms often co-occur with GAD, but there is a lack of consensus as to how this affects treatment response. This study will determine the role of depressive symptoms in the CBT treatment of GAD. The main goals of the study are to determine if: 1) pre-treatment levels of depression predict poorer treatment response to the GAD treatment, and 2) if residual depressive symptoms (assessed at the end of the treatment program) predict relapse following treatment. The participants are 110 Francophone adults in Montreal between ages 18 and 65 with a primary diagnosis of GAD, recruited from the Anxiety Disorders Clinic of Sacré-Coeur Hospital or physician-referred. Our CBT treatment is administered over 14 weekly sessions with licensed psychologists. The treatment components target specific processes in our model of GAD while building tolerance and acceptance of uncertainty at each stage of treatment. This study will increase our understanding of depressive symptoms' impact on GAD treatment. If depressive symptoms have a significant impact on treatment outcomes this will inform clinical practice as to the importance of: 1) systematically assessing depressive symptoms throughout treatment, and 2) integration of direct treatment for depressive symptoms into the GAD treatment protocol.