Anxiety treatment serving Wellington — exposure-based CBT, in-house psychiatry.

RECO Health treats anxiety disorders — GAD, panic, social anxiety, and OCD — at PHP and IOP levels of care 28 miles east of Wellington in Delray Beach. In-house psychiatry runs SSRI pharmacotherapy at anxiety-appropriate doses (sertraline 150–200 mg, escitalopram 20 mg), and individual therapists deliver disorder-specific exposure protocols: ERP for OCD, interoceptive exposure for panic, in-vivo exposure for social anxiety. Wellington clients often pair the Delray program with a stay in RECO's sober-living network rather than commuting 38 minutes each way while symptoms are at their worst.

Wellington sits about 28 miles west of RECO Health’s Delray Beach campus — a 38-minute drive across Palm Beach County that most anxiety clients don’t want to make twice a day when symptoms are at their worst. That geography shapes how care is structured: for residents of Olympia, Versailles, Aero Club, Palm Beach Polo, and Wellington View, PHP and IOP tracks are often paired with a stay in RECO’s sober-living network rather than a daily commute, giving clinical depth without the logistical strain of daily eastbound travel. Our anxiety treatment program treats generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety, and OCD at partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient levels of care with in-house psychiatry on the same corridor as therapy.

Disorder-specific assessment before treatment starts

“Anxiety” is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Two clients can walk in describing racing heart, catastrophic thoughts, and avoidance, and one has panic disorder while the other has OCD with panic-like intrusions — and the treatment structures for those two diagnoses share almost nothing. RECO’s intake uses the GAD-7 to quantify generalized anxiety severity, the Panic Disorder Severity Scale (PDSS) for panic frequency and functional impairment, the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) to distinguish performance from generalized social anxiety subtypes, and the Y-BOCS to establish OCD symptom burden across obsessions and compulsions.

Every treatment plan names the primary DSM-5-TR diagnosis and specifies which measure will be tracked at intake, mid-treatment, and discharge. That specificity matters clinically: a client with contamination OCD will collapse in a generic “anxiety group” because the exposure hierarchy that treats their disorder is fundamentally incompatible with the reassurance-heavy structure that soothes GAD. When the diagnosis is unclear at intake — as it often is with comorbid depression, ADHD screened via the ASRS, or a trauma history layered underneath — the psychiatrist and lead therapist reconcile within the first week rather than treating a placeholder.

SSRI pharmacotherapy at anxiety-appropriate doses

Sertraline, escitalopram, paroxetine, and fluoxetine are all FDA-approved for one or more anxiety disorders, and the in-house psychiatry team prescribes them at doses calibrated to the anxiety indication rather than the depression indication. Anxiety-effective dosing typically sits at the upper end of the depression range — sertraline 150 to 200 mg, escitalopram 20 mg, paroxetine 40 to 60 mg — with a deliberately slow initial titration to blunt the early activation and jitteriness that drives premature discontinuation. Clients who have “failed” prior SSRI trials at 25 to 50 mg of sertraline often haven’t failed SSRIs at all; they’ve failed subtherapeutic dosing.

Adjuncts have well-defined roles. Buspirone augments generalized anxiety when SSRI monotherapy plateaus. Hydroxyzine is available for scheduled or as-needed use without dependence risk, and it fits clients who need something in hand between exposures. Propranolol at 10 to 40 mg carries a legitimate indication for performance anxiety and situational autonomic symptoms. For treatment-resistant presentations with depressive overlap, the in-house ketamine and TMS services give the psychiatry team options — an rTMS course delivering 3,000 pulses per session at 120% of motor threshold, or a supervised IV ketamine series — that a community outpatient prescriber usually can’t offer on the same day as the intake evaluation.

Exposure-based CBT is the therapy that actually works

For every anxiety disorder, the evidence base points to exposure-based cognitive behavioral therapy rather than supportive talk therapy or generalized skills groups. For OCD, that means Exposure and Response Prevention — a structured, hierarchical, therapist-guided protocol that requires the client to face triggering stimuli without performing the compulsive ritual, sustained until anxiety extinguishes on its own. For panic disorder, interoceptive exposure to feared bodily sensations — deliberate hyperventilation, spinning, breath-holding — demonstrates experientially that the sensations themselves are not dangerous. For social anxiety, graded in-vivo exposures paired with cognitive restructuring do the work that years of avoidance have been undoing.

RECO’s individual therapists are trained to run these protocols with fidelity, and the group programming is designed to support the individual exposure work rather than replace it. A client in PHP for OCD isn’t sitting in a generic anxiety group; they’re doing their ERP hierarchy with their assigned therapist and using group time for skills that generalize — cognitive defusion from ACT, behavioral activation, distress tolerance drills from DBT, motivational interviewing when ambivalence about exposure surfaces — while the disorder-specific exposure work stays in individual sessions where it belongs.

Why we don’t lean on benzodiazepines

Benzodiazepines relieve acute anxiety quickly and reliably. They also blunt the extinction learning that makes exposure therapy work, meaning that a client dosed with alprazolam before a feared situation gets through it without acquiring the new safety learning that would let them face it unmedicated next time. In clients with any substance use history — a substantial share of RECO’s population given the dual-diagnosis focus of the campus — benzodiazepine prescribing also carries dependence, tolerance, and overdose risks that categorically outweigh the short-term symptom relief.

When situational bridging is genuinely clinically indicated, hydroxyzine, gabapentin, or a short course of a low-dose beta-blocker cover most use cases without the dependence trajectory. If a client arrives already on chronic benzodiazepines, the psychiatry team runs a structured taper — typically converting to a longer-acting agent such as clonazepam or diazepam and reducing over weeks to months — rather than an abrupt discontinuation that would provoke rebound anxiety and seizure risk.

What to expect on your first visit

The admissions process begins with a phone screen that captures presenting symptoms, prior treatment history, current medications, and any active safety concerns. If PHP or IOP looks like the right level of care under ASAM Criteria dimensions and clinical severity, intake is typically scheduled within 24 to 72 hours. On day one, clients complete the GAD-7, PHQ-9, and the disorder-specific scale relevant to their presentation; meet with a staff psychiatrist for a full evaluation and medication reconciliation; and sit down with the lead therapist to draft an initial treatment plan with a named primary diagnosis and a tracked outcome measure.

Clients from Wellington who choose the sober-living option move in the same day. Those commuting from home leave with a transportation plan, medication starts if indicated, and a written schedule for the first week. Full IOP typically runs nine hours per week across three days; PHP runs 25 to 30 hours across five days. Average length of stay is four to six weeks in PHP followed by six to twelve weeks in IOP, with the specific timeline driven by outcome-scale trajectories rather than a fixed program length.

Insurance and admissions from Wellington

RECO Health is in-network with Florida Blue, Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and BCBS, and the admissions team runs a full verification of benefits before a client commits to admit. That call establishes the specific PHP and IOP day rates, session limits, prior authorization requirements, and out-of-pocket exposure — no client is admitted without a clear picture of what the plan covers and what it doesn’t.

For Wellington clients, the drive from the equestrian neighborhoods to Delray runs 38 minutes off-peak via Southern Boulevard and I-95 or Forest Hill Boulevard and the Florida Turnpike. Clients who prefer clinical density with physical separation from home stressors typically pair the Delray program with a stay in RECO’s sober-living network for the PHP phase, then step down to remote-friendly IOP or transition to daily commuting once symptoms and outcome scores stabilize.

Serving residents of: Olympia, Versailles, Aero Club, Palm Beach Polo, Wellington View.