Overcome Death Anxiety: The Development of an Online Cognitive Behaviour Therapy Programme for Fears of Death

ABSTRACT

[...]death anxiety has been proposed to be a transdiagnostic construct, underpinning numerous mental health conditions (for a review, see Iverach, Menzies, & Menzies, 2014). [...]the underlying fear of death itself remains unaddressed by current gold standard treatments for mental health conditions. [...]recent research found that death anxiety is associated with how many disorders are experienced prior to current disorder onset, at least for obsessive-compulsive disorder (Menzies, Zuccala, Sharpe, & Dar-Nimrod, 2020b) Despite the importance of targeting death anxiety in treatment, at present, no self-help treatments for this construct exist. [...]to the best of the authors' knowledge, only two published therapist manuals exist, each of which only specifically address treating death anxiety in a single brief chapter (Furer, Walker, & Stein, 2007;Willson & Veale, 2009).