Flooding

• what is it?

  • exposing patients to their phobic stimulus without gradual exposure
  • immediate exposure to frightening situation
  • flooding sessions are longer than SD sessions - often 2-3 hours
  • stops phobic responses quickly - there is no option of avoidance so the patient quickly learns that the phobic stimulus is harmless - in classical conditioning this is called extinction
  • the learned response is extinguished when the conditioned stimulus is encountered without the unconditioned stimulus and no longer produces fear
  • patient needs to give fully informed consent
• strength

  • evidence that flooding is an effective treatment
  • Choy et al (2007) - flooding is more effective than SD at treating phobias
  • Ougrin (2011) - flooding is quicker and more effective than cognitive treatments for phobias
  • this supports the use of flooding as a behavioural treatment for phobias
• weakness

  • flooding can be highly traumatic
  • Schumacher et al (2015) - flooding rated more stressful than SD - ethical issue of knowingly causing stress to their clients
  • there is a lot of dropping out of this process
  • although patients give consent to having the treatment, many fail to complete the treatment which reduced the effectiveness of the treatment and time and money can be wasted
• weakness

  • only mask symptoms and do not tackle the underlying cause of phobias (symptom substitution)
  • Persons (1986) reported a case of a woman with a phobia of death who was treated using flooding. her fear of death declined but her fear of being criticised got worse
  • even though the symptoms are removed, the cause still remains and symptoms will resurface possibly in another form