Psychological Treatments

There are now a very wide range of psychosocial treatments for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Major treatment groups include behavior analysis, behavior modification, sensory interventions, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), counseling, mindfulness, and psychotherapy. Most outcome research has been behavior analytic research using small N experimental designs and is associated with large effect sizes in many applications. Over the last 30 years, there has been increasing application of CBT that is associated with modest outcomes and questionable quality of research, although the application of anger management is associated with more robust effect sizes than application to anxiety and depression. In addition, recent research on mindfulness is another relatively new promising approach. Research on sensory interventions has proven to be negative when well-conducted and otherwise weak and absent, suggesting that sensory treatments are not recommended. Finally, there continues to be little outcome research on counseling and psychotherapy with individuals.