Anxiety Treatment in Scottsdale & Phoenix

Comprehensive, individualized anxiety treatment from board-certified psychiatrist Dr. Michael DePalma, DO — integrating medication management, CBT, mindfulness, and psychodynamic psychotherapy for adults in Scottsdale and Phoenix, AZ.

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Anxiety Treatment That Addresses the Full Picture

Anxiety is the most common psychiatric condition affecting adults in Scottsdale and Phoenix — and one of the most inadequately treated. Many patients have experienced what passes for anxiety treatment in the current healthcare landscape: a prescription for an SSRI or a benzodiazepine, minimal follow-up, and little or no therapeutic work. When symptoms persist or the medication stops working, the options offered are rarely more comprehensive.

Dr. DePalma treats anxiety with a genuinely integrated approach that combines the most evidence-supported interventions available — medication management grounded in deep pharmacological expertise, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy rooted in advanced residency training, mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and psychodynamic psychotherapy — tailored to each patient’s specific anxiety presentation, history, and goals.

Anxiety disorders are not a single, uniform condition. Generalized anxiety, panic disorder, social anxiety, health anxiety, and phobias each have distinct presentations and respond differently to different interventions. Effective treatment requires a clinician who understands those distinctions — and has genuine expertise across the modalities that address them.

What Anxiety Disorders Actually Are

Anxiety is a normal and adaptive human emotion. Anxiety disorders develop when the brain’s threat-detection system becomes dysregulated — generating alarm responses that are disproportionate to actual threat, difficult to control, and persistent enough to interfere significantly with daily functioning.

At the neurobiological level, anxiety disorders involve dysregulation of multiple brain systems — including the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis that governs the stress response. These systems interact with cognitive patterns, behavioral habits, and psychological history in ways that sustain and often intensify anxiety over time without intervention.

This complexity is precisely why no single treatment modality produces optimal outcomes for every patient presenting with anxiety. The most effective anxiety treatment addresses the condition at multiple levels simultaneously — neurobiological, cognitive, behavioral, and psychological. Dr. DePalma’s training and clinical approach are built around exactly this kind of comprehensive, multi-modal care.

Common Anxiety Disorder Presentations

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) — chronic, pervasive worry across multiple domains that is difficult to control and accompanied by physical symptoms including muscle tension, fatigue, and sleep disruption
Panic Disorder — recurrent unexpected panic attacks accompanied by persistent anticipatory anxiety and behavioral avoidance
Social Anxiety Disorder — intense fear of social situations and negative evaluation that significantly limits occupational and interpersonal functioning
Health Anxiety — excessive preoccupation with having or developing a serious illness, often involving reassurance-seeking and medical avoidance
Specific Phobias — intense, disproportionate fear of specific objects or situations that generates avoidance and significant distress
Agoraphobia — avoidance of situations or places where escape might be difficult or help unavailable in the event of a panic attack

Psychiatric Medication Management for Anxiety

Medication plays an important and sometimes crucial role in anxiety treatment — particularly for moderate to severe presentations, anxiety accompanied by significant neurovegetative symptoms, or anxiety that has not responded adequately to psychotherapy alone.

Dr. DePalma brings exceptional depth to medication management for anxiety. As a certified Diplomate Master Psychopharmacologist through the Neuroscience Education Institute — with a foundational degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology — he has an intricate understanding of how anxiolytic and antidepressant medications work at the biological level. This includes their receptor profiles, metabolism, drug interactions, and the precise clinical conditions under which each is and is not appropriate.

Individualized Prescribing — Not a Default Protocol

Medication selection at One Psychiatry is never algorithmic. Dr. DePalma evaluates each patient’s complete clinical picture — symptom profile, anxiety subtype, prior medication trials and their effects, medical history, co-occurring conditions, and lifestyle factors — before recommending any pharmacological intervention. SSRIs, SNRIs, buspirone, and other evidence-supported options are selected and adjusted based on individual response.

Benzodiazepines — while rapidly effective — carry significant risks for dependence and cognitive impairment and are not appropriate for long-term anxiety management in most patients. Dr. DePalma’s depth of pharmacological training means he navigates these decisions with precision and genuine clinical judgment rather than defaulting to the most convenient or familiar option.

Medication as a Neuroplastic Tool

Beyond symptom reduction, well-targeted medication for anxiety can serve a critical function in the broader treatment plan — optimizing the neurological conditions under which psychotherapeutic work becomes most effective. By reducing the neurobiological intensity of the anxiety response, medication can lower the activation threshold enough to allow CBT, mindfulness, and psychodynamic work to produce meaningfully deeper results than they would achieve against full anxiety intensity.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety — Advanced Training, Not a Protocol

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the most extensively researched and empirically supported psychotherapeutic approach for anxiety disorders, with decades of clinical trial data supporting its efficacy across GAD, panic disorder, social anxiety, health anxiety, and specific phobias.

Dr. DePalma’s CBT training goes significantly beyond standard residency exposure. During his psychiatric residency at the University of Arizona, Dr. DePalma completed two years of intensive CBT training under Dr. Nicholas Breitborde — a distinguished professor and prolific published CBT researcher. This training emphasized the rigorous application of CBT principles alongside medication management — an integrated model that Dr. DePalma has carried directly into clinical practice at One Psychiatry.

For Scottsdale and Phoenix patients with anxiety, this means access to a psychiatrist whose CBT training was developed under direct supervision of a leading researcher in the field — not a prescriber with passing familiarity with therapeutic techniques.

How CBT Addresses Anxiety

CBT for anxiety works by systematically identifying and restructuring the cognitive patterns that generate and maintain disproportionate anxiety responses — catastrophizing, overestimation of threat, intolerance of uncertainty, and avoidance-based behavioral patterns that provide short-term relief while strengthening anxiety over time.

Core mechanisms include:

Cognitive restructuring — identifying and challenging distorted threat appraisals and catastrophic predictions that anxiety generates and reinforces
Behavioral experiments — testing feared predictions through direct experience rather than avoidance, building an accurate evidence base about actual risk
Exposure work — graduated, structured exposure to anxiety-provoking situations that reduces avoidance and demonstrates through direct experience that feared outcomes are manageable
Interoceptive exposure — for panic disorder specifically, deliberate exposure to feared physical sensations to reduce their power to trigger panic responses
Behavioral activation — reversing the avoidance and withdrawal patterns that anxiety drives and that deepen its grip over time

Synapses are created through this process. Beneficial, nourishing neural networks are strengthened while anxiety-maintaining patterns are allowed to atrophy.

Mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Anxiety

Mindfulness-based approaches and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy are particularly well-suited to anxiety — a condition that is fundamentally characterized by an adversarial relationship with one’s own internal experience. The anxious mind fights against anxiety, attempts to suppress or control unwanted thoughts and sensations, and treats uncertainty as intolerable. These responses, paradoxically, maintain and intensify the anxiety they are attempting to eliminate.

ACT for anxiety works by fundamentally shifting this relationship. Rather than attempting to reduce anxiety or eliminate anxious thoughts, ACT helps patients develop the psychological flexibility to experience anxiety without being controlled by it — to observe anxious thoughts and sensations with clarity and without fusion, and to act in accordance with values rather than in response to fear.

Why Mindfulness Specifically Helps Anxiety

Anxiety characteristically pulls attention toward the future — catastrophic predictions, worst-case scenarios, the endless “what if” of anticipatory anxiety. Mindfulness training systematically cultivates the capacity to anchor attention in present-moment experience, interrupting the anticipatory cycles that sustain anxious arousal. Over time this is not simply a coping skill — it is a genuine neuroplastic change. The neural networks associated with ruminative future-oriented threat processing are demonstrably altered by sustained mindfulness practice.

Elements of ACT and CBT combine in highly effective ways for anxiety — and frequently do in Dr. DePalma’s clinical work with anxious patients in Scottsdale and Phoenix. CBT restructures the content of anxious cognition. ACT changes the patient’s relationship to that cognition. Together they address anxiety at both the structural and experiential level.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for Anxiety

For many patients — particularly those whose anxiety is rooted in longstanding relational patterns, early developmental experiences, attachment disruption, or a persistent sense of threat or unsafety that predates any identifiable trigger — psychodynamic psychotherapy reaches dimensions of the anxiety experience that CBT and medication do not fully address.

Anxiety is not always primarily a cognitive distortion or a neurochemical imbalance. For some patients it is a signal — pointing toward unprocessed emotional material, unresolved relational dynamics, or core beliefs about safety, worth, and the intentions of others that were formed early and have never been examined directly.

Psychodynamic work creates the conditions in which that material can be examined — safely, with a clinician who understands both the psychological and neurobiological dimensions of what is being worked through. Emotion becomes a guide rather than a threat. Longstanding patterns become visible and workable. The anxiety that has organized a patient’s life for years begins to loosen its grip as the psychological ground it was built on shifts.

Dr. DePalma integrates psychodynamic understanding into his work with anxious patients in Scottsdale and Phoenix, often combining it with CBT and mindfulness approaches in ways that address both the surface structure of anxious cognition and the deeper emotional material that sustains it.

Why Integrated Anxiety Treatment Produces Better Outcomes

The evidence base for anxiety treatment consistently supports the same conclusion: combined treatment — medication and psychotherapy together — produces better outcomes than either alone for moderate to severe anxiety. And within psychotherapy, flexibility across modalities — matching the approach to the patient’s specific anxiety presentation and history rather than applying a single protocol universally — produces better outcomes than any single approach used in isolation.

One Psychiatry is built around exactly this model. Dr. DePalma brings genuine clinical depth across pharmacology, CBT, mindfulness and ACT, and psychodynamic work. He is both the prescribing physician and the treating therapist. Every clinical decision — what medication to use, which therapeutic approach to lead with, how to combine modalities — is made with the full clinical picture in view, by the same clinician, at every appointment.

For adults in Scottsdale and Phoenix seeking anxiety treatment that is genuinely comprehensive rather than superficially so, One Psychiatry offers a level of integrated clinical expertise that is rare in this market.

Who Benefits From Anxiety Treatment at One Psychiatry

One Psychiatry serves adults 18 and older. Dr. DePalma treats Scottsdale and Phoenix adults presenting with:

Generalized Anxiety Disorder — chronic worry and physical anxiety symptoms
Panic Disorder — recurrent panic attacks and anticipatory anxiety
Social Anxiety Disorder — fear of social situations and negative evaluation
Health Anxiety — excessive preoccupation with illness
Agoraphobia — avoidance of situations associated with panic
Specific Phobias — disproportionate fear of specific objects or situations
Anxiety co-occurring with depression, ADHD, OCD, or PTSD
Performance anxiety — professional, academic, or interpersonal
Anxiety without a formal diagnosis — patients who feel chronically on edge, overwhelmed, or unable to relax despite no identifiable cause

Location

5635 N Scottsdale Rd Suite #170, Scottsdale, AZ 85250

P: (480) 296-2048

F: (844) 965-9613

Telehealth available for established patients following in-person evaluation, with a minimum of one in-person visit per year.

Frequently Asked Questions — Anxiety Treatment Scottsdale & Phoenix

How do you decide which treatment approach is right for my anxiety? The initial 60-minute psychiatric evaluation provides the clinical foundation for all treatment decisions. Dr. DePalma considers your complete symptom history, the specific nature of your anxiety presentation, prior treatments and their outcomes, co-occurring conditions, and personal goals before recommending any specific approach or combination.

Is medication required for anxiety treatment? No. Medication is evaluated on an individual basis and recommended when clinically appropriate. Some patients benefit significantly from pharmacological support alongside therapy. Others pursue therapy-focused treatment without medication. Dr. DePalma discusses all options at the initial evaluation.

What is the difference between CBT and medication for anxiety? Medication reduces the neurobiological intensity of the anxiety response — often relatively quickly. CBT restructures the cognitive and behavioral patterns that generate and maintain anxiety — producing changes that are more durable and that reduce relapse risk. For many patients the combination produces superior outcomes to either alone.

Do you treat panic attacks? Yes. Panic disorder is one of the anxiety presentations Dr. DePalma regularly treats, using a combination of medication management and CBT including interoceptive exposure techniques specific to panic.

Can anxiety be cured? Anxiety disorders are highly treatable. Many patients achieve dramatic reductions in symptom severity and interference with appropriate treatment. Some achieve full remission. The goal of treatment at One Psychiatry is the maximum possible reduction in anxiety’s impact on daily functioning and quality of life.

Do you accept insurance? One Psychiatry is a private-pay practice. Patients with PPO insurance may be able to seek out-of-network reimbursement using a superbill. → pricing