ODD Clinical Trial

This post is a sort of advertisement, except that no one's getting paid anything. A colleague of mine and his group just got a 2 year grant to conduct a trial of Regulation Focused Psychotherapy (RFP) for the treatment of Oppositional Defiant Disorder in children ages 5-12. This is the flyer:

That's the advertisement part. I think it's a great idea. But just to be clear, not only am I not being paid, I'm not involved in the study in any way except feeling pleased about it, and writing this post.

Why do I think it's a great idea? The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has a brochure about ODD. It describes treatment for ODD, which includes a combination of Parent-Management Training Programs and Family Therapy, Cognitive Problem-Solving Skills Training, Social-Skills Programs and School-Based Programs, plus or minus medication.

These are all useful tools, but none of them addresses the underlying affects, and difficulty in regulating these affects, that children with ODD experience. That's where RFP comes in.

The group conducting the study recently published the Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C) with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach.

In it, they describe the way, "RFP-C enables clinicians to help by addressing and detailing how the child’s externalizing behaviors have meaning which they can convey to the child," and more specifically, that RFP-C can:

• Achieve symptomatic improvement and developmental maturation as a result of gains in the ability to tolerate and metabolize painful emotions, by addressing the crucial underlying emotional component.
• Diminish the child’s use of aggression as the main coping device by allowing painful emotions to be mastered more effectively.
• Help to systematically address avoidance mechanisms, talking to the child about how their disruptive behavior helps them avoid painful emotions.
• Facilitate development of an awareness that painful emotions do not have to be so vigorously warded off, allowing the child to reach this implicit awareness within the relationship with the clinician, which can then be expanded to life situations at home and at school.

That's my pitch. So if you know anyone in the New York City area who could benefit from this trial, whether child, parent, educator or clinician, please get this information to them.

Thanks.