Response and ongoing skills use following a single-session virtual cognitive behavioral workshop for graduate students

Abstract

Objective

Graduate students frequently experience anxiety, depression, and psychological distress. Counseling centers struggle to meet this need. Brief, skills-based treatments to mitigate burgeoning or mild mental health problems could alleviate this problem.

Participants

Participants were 51 graduate students in years one through seven of their respective programs.

Methods

We examined a single-session virtual cognitive behavioral workshop and outcomes up to 6-months later.

Results

The program was feasible, acceptable, and beneficial for mood, anxiety, and emotion regulation, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. A majority of participants reported ongoing skills use at follow-up. Primary barriers to more frequent use were forgetting, time constraints, and difficulty when experiencing strong emotions. Few participants endorsed expecting that skills would not be helpful or forgetting how to use skills.

Conclusions

This intervention may provide scalable, much needed aid to graduate schools. Moreover, results highlight opportunities for further enhancing brief interventions.

Keywords:

• Cognitive behavioral therapy
• graduate students
• group therapy
• single session intervention
• transdiagnostic

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Ellen Finch, Adam Jaroszewski, Michael Osorio, Julianne Wilner, and Brittany Woods for their work in co-facilitating workshops, and Drs. Paul Barriera and Kate Bentley for their support and feedback on the project.

Conflict of interest disclosure

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report. The authors confirm that the research presented in this article met the ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements, of United States of America and received approval from the Institutional Review Board of Harvard University.

Data availability

De-identified data available upon request to corresponding author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Sackler Scholar Programme in Psychobiology.