Dr. David Barlow Neurotic Paradox

Barlow’s research on sexuality and anxiety continued at Brown University, as did the development of his ideas on the integration of science and practice (e.g. Barlow, 1981; Barlow, Hayes, & Nelson, 1984).  Nevertheless, his research productivity diminished somewhat at Brown because it was necessary for him to attend to administrative and political issues in a large department of psychiatry, and Barlow decided in 1979 that it was time to relocate to a setting that allowed a more complete focus on clinical research.  At the State University of New York at Albany, where he was to stay for 17 years, Barlow joined his friend and colleague from his Mississippi days, Ed Blanchard.  Barlow and Blanchard together initiated the Center for Stress and Anxiety Disorders which became a large federally funded research clinic. It was here that the major themes of Barlow’s research were fully elaborated.  Early research on the nosology of anxiety and mood disorders, in collaboration with Peter DiNardo and later Tim Brown, resulted in new conceptualizations of generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder (e.g., Barlow, Blanchard, Vermilyea, Vermilyea, & Di Nardo, 1986).  These developments were communicated through Barlow’s membership on the anxiety disorders workgroup for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed., revised; DSM-III-R)) and later on the task force for DSM-IV.

Barlow’s experimental psychopathology research focused on the nature of anxiety as evidenced in men, and later in women, presenting with sexual dysfunction.  This particular paradigm afforded an easily quantifiable output of the influence of cognitive and affective components of anxiety in the form of psychophysiological measures of sexual arousal, which could be manipulated without patients’ awareness.  This program of research resulted in a model of the process of anxiety, manifested as sexual dysfunction (Barlow, 1986). Also during this time, Barlow and his colleagues, particularly Michelle Craske, developed new treatments for anxiety and related disorders, most notably a new psychological approach to treating a panic disorder that has been positively evaluated and widely accepted (e.g., Barlow, Gorman, Shear, & Woods, 2000).  Programmatic research on anxiety during the 1980s resulted in a book pulling most of these ideas together (Barlow, 1988), which was revised in 2002.  It was here also that Barlow began a close collaborative relationship with Mark Durand, resulting in a textbook on abnormal psychology.  In 1993, during a term as president of the Division of Clinical Psychology, Barlow developed task forces and other mechanisms to emphasize and communicate the empirical support for psychological treatments to psychologists and to the public at large, and these ideas merged with the growing mandate for evidenced-based practice (Barlow, 2004).