Anxiety treatment and symptoms usually takes a concrete form. People worry about their jobs, their families, their health. But there is another form of anxiety, known as existential anxiety (sometimes referred to by the German word angst, as it was German-speaking psychotherapists who first identified it as a distinct class of anxiety). Existential anxiety relates to more abstract concepts, such as mortality and the quest for meaning in life. In this article, we will look at three types of psychotherapy methods related to anxiety disorders and describe how they treat existential anxiety.

Existential Anxiety Psychotherapy #1: Multi-Modal Therapy

Multi-modal therapy is a type of psychotherapy developed by the South African psychologist Arnold Lazarus in response to what he viewed as a disturbingly high relapse rate among anxiety disorder sufferers being treated with traditional Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) methods. Multimodal therapy is based around the acronym BASIC ID, which stands for Behavior, Affect, Sensation, Imagery, Cognition, Interpersonal (relationships), and Drugs, though the latter aspect includes all biological factors related to brain chemistry. It advocates eclecticism in treating patients, drawing treatments from a variety of different traditions and approaches.

Multimodal therapy takes great pains to tailor itself to the needs of the individual client, meaning that it is unsuitable for use in an anxiety group therapy setting. It can sometimes include treatments from outside what as traditionally thought of as anxiety psychotherapy, such as diet and exercise regimes where an unhealthy lifestyle is thought to be a contributing factor in the patient’s psychological disorders.

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