An effectiveness study of a culturally enriched school-based CBT anxiety prevention program.

Anxiety disorders are prevalent in the school-aged population and are present across cultural groups. Scant research exists on culturally relevant prevention and intervention programs for mental health problems in the Aboriginal populations. An established cognitive behavioral program, FRIENDS for Life, was enriched to include content that was culturally relevant to Aboriginal students.

Evaluation of a preventive intervention for child anxiety in two randomized attention-control school trials.

The present research examined the effectiveness of a cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) based intervention program, FRIENDS, for children from grades 4 to 6, using random assignment at the school-level and an attention-control design in two longitudinal studies. The first study targeted children with anxiety symptoms (N=191, mean age=10.1) as screened with self, parent, and teacher-reports; the second study took a universal approach with full classrooms of children participating (N=253, mean age=9.