flooding evaluation

• Less cost

  One strength of flooding is that it is highly 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, ten sessions for SD to achieve the same result. Even allowing for a longer session (perhaps three hours) this makes flooding more cost-effective. This means that more people can be treated at the same cost with flooding than with SD or other therapies.
• Far more traumatic

  One limitation of flooding is that it is a highly unpleasant experience.

  Confronting one's phobic stimulus in an extreme form provokes tremendous anxiety. Sarah Schumacher et al. (2015) 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. More seriously, the traumatic nature of flooding means that attrition (dropout) rates are higher than for SD. This suggests that, overall, therapists may avoid using this treatment.
• Observes symptom substitution

  A limitation of behavioural therapies, including flooding, is that they only mask symptoms and do not tackle the underlying causes of phobias (symptom substitution). For example, Jacqueline Persons (1986) reported the 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.

  However, the only evidence for symptom substitution comes in the form of case studies which, in this case, may only generalise to the phobias in the study (e.g. phobia of death may be different from a phobia of heights).