[Ambulatory treatment of anxiety disorder. Behavior therapy and drug therapy approaches]. / Die ambulante Behandlung der Angststörung. Verhaltenstherapeutische und medikamentöse Strategien.

Phobic disorders and other anxiety disorders belong to the most frequent psychiatric illnesses. Since they can be overlapped by other mental illnesses, they are often overlooked in practice. For example, comorbidity between anxiety and depression is very high. Also, personality disorders and a person's biography can lay the ground to anxiety. A typical complication of anxiety disorders is dependence of substances, predominantly of tranquilizers and alcohol. By means of a clinical case example, the topic of anxiety disorders is discussed practically and the treatment concept is detailed. Already during ambulatory care in a general practitioner's office behavioral therapeutic strategies can be implemented besides drug treatment with relatively moderate effort.

Reliability in dream research: a methodological note.

The coefficients of internal consistency and retest reliability had been rarely investigated within the methodology of dream content analysis. Analyzing a dream series of elderly, healthy persons obtained from weekly telephone interviews, the internal consistency of a series of 20 dreams and retests after 4 or 22 weeks, respectively, had been computed. The findings indicate that dream recall and dream length are quite stable, but dream characteristics such as bizarreness and emotional tone underlie large intraindividual fluctuations. In order to obtain reliable measures for these variables which will be important for correlational studies, including waking-life trait measures, one has to obtain as many dreams as possible (about 20) in a very short time period. Further research is needed to extend the present findings to diary dreams and laboratory dreams.

A preliminary study of dream-telling among mentally healthy elderly: no adverse effects on life or sleep quality.

While there have been several studies about dreams and dreaming among the elderly, there does not seem to have been any study of the effects of regular dream-telling (without interpretation). Listening to dreams could become a regular part of caring for the elderly and infirm. The effects of regular dream-telling in mentally healthy elderly clinical research volunteers were measured on several variables using standardized testing and self-report: life satisfaction, intrapsychic boundaries, sleep quality, sleep duration, dream recall, dream tone, and dream epoch, and were compared with two control groups. The six variables showed no significant differences among the three groups, indicating that dream-telling produced no adverse effects. The present findings seem to imply that dream-telling is not dangerous for mentally healthy individuals and may thus serve as a baseline for future studies involving geriatric patients with mental disorders or elderly undergoing significant life-events, e.g., bereavement or retirement, using the method of regular dream-telling.