Flooding- evaluations

Strength- it is cost effective

Clinical effectiveness means how effective a therapy is at tackling symptoms

However, when we provide therapies in health systems like the NHS, we also need to think about how much they cost

A therapy is cost effective if it is clinically effective and not expensive

Flooding can work in as little as one session as opposed to say 10 sessions for SD to achieve the same or similar results

This means that more people can be treated at the same cost with flooding than with SD or other therapies

Limitation- it is a highly unpleasant experience

Confronting one’s phobic stimulus in an extreme provokes tremendous anxiety

Schumacher et al found that participants and therapists rated flooding as significantly more stressful than SD

This raises the ethical issue for psychologists of knowingly causing stress to their clients, although this is not a serious issue provided they obtain informed consent

In addition the traumatic nature of flooding means that attrition rates are higher than for SD

This suggest that, overall, therapists may avoid using this treatment

Limitation- of behavioural therapies such as flooding is that they only mask symptoms and do not tackle the underlying causes of phobias (symptom subsitution)

For example, Persons reported the case of a women with a phobia of death who was treated using flooding

Her fear of death declined, but her dear of being criticised got worse

However, the only evidence for substitution comes in form of case studies which may only generalise to the phobias in the study

This means that there is limited evidence to support the claim of symptom substitution, reducing the validity of the criticism that behavioural therapies only treat the symptoms rather than the underlying cause of phobias

a