Prolonged in vivo exposure therapy with a 70-year-old woman.

Prolonged in vivo exposure therapy is continuous real life exposure of a phobic person to an anxiety evoking stimulus, and maintaining this exposure until the anxiety is no longer elicited. This technique has been found to be an effective treatment for a variety of anxiety related disorders (Boulougouris and Rabavilas, 1977; Gelder, 1979) and usually relieves the symptomatology of simple phobias in approximately eight sessions (Marks, 1979~). Although the procedure has been extensively investigated in undergraduate volunteers (Mathews, 1978), psychiatric patients (Marks, 19796) and in children (Kandell, Ayllon and Rosenbaum, 1977; Yule, Sacks and Hersov, 1974), there are no reports in the literature describing its use with elderly patients. The present case study reports on the successful use of in vivo exposure in the treatment of a 70-yr-old woman with a monosymptomatic phobic disorder.