Anxiety Treatment
in Chicago

by Dave Carbonell, PhD

Most anxiety disorders are quite treatable. When people get appropriate help, they generally get better. If you're like most of the clients I work with, you can probably make a good recovery from these problems.

I do most of my work in individual sessions, conducted online via Zoom. I also offer an online class for fear of flying once or twice a year. If you want to schedule an initial appointment with me, please use the contact form. If you want to know about fees and insurance, you will find that information below.

This is a different approach to
anxiety treatment

My approach to anxiety treatment is based on cognitive behavioral methods, and it's pretty concrete and practical. It's very different from traditional psychotherapy. Traditional psychotherapy will review your early life experiences and try to answer the "why" question - "why do I have this problem?".

If you work with me, we'll be much more focused on the what and how questions - "what happens to me when I become anxious?" and "how can I handle this differently, in ways that enable me to calm down?".

First Session

When we meet for a first session, I'll ask a lot of questions, mostly aimed at helping me get a good picture of how you experience anxiety: what symptoms you experience, where you experience them, how they affect your life, how you respond to them, what you've tried in the past, and similar questions. I'll want to know a little about your work, family, and daily routine, maybe a little about your background, but mostly I'm going to focus on the anxiety problems that brought you in.

I want to get a good enough understanding of your present experience with anxiety to be able to start suggesting responses, techniques, and experiments you can try within the first or second week of anxiety treatment.

...and beyond

Thereafter, we'll use our time together to review the results you get from these techniques, fine tune them as necessary, and plan more "homework" for you to do in between sessions. As you do better, and start achieving the goals you brought into therapy, we'll start meeting less often, in preparation for finishing our work together.

How long will treatment take?

It depends on the problems you bring in, how long you've had them, how deeply embedded they are in your daily life, and other factors. But in general, this is not a long term kind of treatment. I see the majority of my patients for somewhere between 5 and 20 visits.

This isn't the kind of treatment in which you come in for a significant time and still don't know if it's helping or not. While I can't say in advance how long your situation may require, I do expect, within a couple of sessions, that you get a good gut sense that this is taking you in the right direction. If that doesn't happen, something's not working right, and you should bring it to my attention.

My Background and Credentials

I'm licensed as a clinical psychologist by the States of Illinois (# 071-003556) and New York (# 015044).

I am also licensed, through an organization called Psypact, to provide online therapy in 36 states, and there are several others where I am eligible. Click here to see a list of the Psypact states. If you live outside those states and seek online therapy, please contact me so that we can find out if it’s permitted.

I've been working exclusively with patients experiencing anxiety disorders since 1990, and have presented workshops for consumers and professionals all over the United States. I'm the author of Panic Attacks Workbook, The Worry Trick, Fear of Flying Workbook, and Outsmart Your Anxious Brain: 10 Simple Ways to Beat the Worry Trick.

Mailing Address

P.O. Box 256539
Chicago, IL 60625

312.912.9989

Fees and Insurance

My fee for an individual session, sixty minutes long, is $250.

I don't belong to any insurance panels. If you make an appointment, I'll ask you to pay me directly. If you have an insurance policy with an "out of network" benefit, you can take the receipt I give you and submit it to your insurance company for partial reimbursement. If your insurance policy is a PPO, you probably have an "out of network" benefit; if it's an HMO, you probably don't.

If you want to find out how much your insurance will reimburse you, contact your insurance company to ask. Tell them you want to see a psychologist who is out of network; with a fee of $250; and a procedure code of 90834 or 90837. That should be all the information they need to calculate your reimbursement.

About My Website

Everything on this web site has been written personally by me, except as otherwise noted. I do not accept advertisements on this site. Any information collected by this website, such as email addresses, will never be passed on to any third party, unless required by law.

The site is wholly funded by Dr. Carbonell and the Anxiety Treatment Center, Ltd.

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