Anxiety treatment serving West Palm Beach — exposure-based CBT, in-house psychiatry.

RECO Health's Delray Beach campus is 18 miles south of West Palm Beach — a 28-minute drive down I-95 and the closest specialist-level PHP/IOP anxiety program for residents from El Cid through downtown WPB. Treatment is exposure-based CBT (ERP for OCD, interoceptive exposure for panic, in-vivo exposure for social anxiety) paired with in-house psychiatric management of SSRIs at anxiety-appropriate doses. Every plan names a DSM-5-TR diagnosis and the outcome measure — GAD-7, PDSS, LSAS, or Y-BOCS — that tracks response.

West Palm Beach sits 18 miles north of RECO Health’s Delray Beach campus — a 28-minute drive down I-95 or Federal Highway outside rush. For Palm Beach County residents living south of Okeechobee Boulevard, from El Cid and Flamingo Park through SoSo, Northwood Hills, and downtown, the Delray campus is the closest specialist-level PHP/IOP program pairing in-house psychiatry with disorder-specific exposure therapy for anxiety disorders.

RECO Health’s anxiety treatment program covers generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder at both partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient levels of care. Treatment is built around SSRI pharmacotherapy and exposure-based CBT — the two interventions with the strongest randomized-trial evidence across the anxiety spectrum.

Disorder-specific assessment before treatment starts

“Anxiety” is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, OCD, and generalized anxiety share a common surface — autonomic arousal, avoidance, catastrophic thinking — but they respond to different exposure structures and different medication ceilings. RECO’s intake starts by naming the primary DSM-5-TR diagnosis and mapping the co-occurring conditions, most commonly major depressive disorder, alcohol use disorder, and stimulant use disorder.

Every admission includes standardized measures administered at intake and repeated on a defined cadence: GAD-7 for generalized anxiety severity, PDSS for panic frequency and impairment, LSAS for social anxiety across performance and interaction situations, and Y-BOCS for OCD symptom burden. PHQ-9 tracks the depressive load that rides along with almost every anxiety presentation, and the AUDIT and DAST screen for the substance use comorbidity that changes both medication and therapy choices.

Treatment plans name the diagnosis, the primary outcome measure, and the target reduction — not “reduce anxiety.” A GAD-7 dropping from 18 to a stable 7 is a different clinical event than a Y-BOCS moving from 28 to 14, and the interventions that produce those changes are not interchangeable.

SSRI pharmacotherapy at anxiety-appropriate doses

Sertraline, escitalopram, paroxetine, and fluoxetine each carry FDA approval for one or more anxiety disorders and remain first-line pharmacotherapy. The dosing detail matters: anxiety-effective doses generally sit at the upper end of the depression range — sertraline 150-200 mg, escitalopram 20 mg, fluoxetine 40-60 mg — and getting there requires a slow initial titration to blunt the activation, jitteriness, and worsening panic that can appear in the first two weeks.

Where SSRIs are insufficient or slow, RECO’s psychiatrists layer targeted adjuncts. Buspirone augments GAD without sedation or dependence. Hydroxyzine covers as-needed anxiety and sleep-onset insomnia. Propranolol has a defined role in performance-situational anxiety. For treatment-resistant OCD, high-dose SSRIs, clomipramine, or antipsychotic augmentation with aripiprazole or risperidone all have evidence, though augmentation is a psychiatric decision made against Y-BOCS trajectory, not a default.

Medication is reviewed weekly during PHP and biweekly through IOP. Dose adjustments key off the standardized scales rather than session-level self-report, which reduces the drift toward reactive prescribing that undermines steady-state response.

Exposure-based CBT is the therapy that works

Across every anxiety disorder, the evidence base points to exposure-based CBT rather than supportive talk therapy. Supportive processing has a role in stabilizing acute distress and in trauma work, but for anxiety it is not the change agent. The change agent is graded, therapist-guided confrontation of the feared stimulus with prevention of the escape or ritual that has been maintaining the fear.

For OCD, that means Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) — a structured hierarchy of triggers with active prevention of compulsions, built out session by session. For panic disorder, interoceptive exposure systematically induces the feared bodily sensations — hyperventilation, spinning, breath-holding — until they lose their catastrophic meaning. For social anxiety, graded in-vivo exposures pair with cognitive restructuring targeting post-event processing and self-focused attention.

RECO’s therapists run these protocols in individual sessions. Group programming — process groups, DBT skills, ACT-based defusion work, motivational interviewing around substance use — supports the individual exposure work rather than replacing it. A client whose anxiety plan is only groups is not in anxiety treatment.

Why we don’t lean on benzodiazepines

Benzodiazepines relieve acute anxiety within minutes, which is why they remain overprescribed for a condition whose treatment horizon is measured in weeks. The clinical problem is twofold. First, benzodiazepines blunt the fear-extinction learning that makes exposure therapy work — clients medicated through an exposure do not consolidate the corrective experience, and the exposure fails to generalize. Second, a large share of RECO’s population meets criteria for a co-occurring substance use disorder, and benzodiazepines in that context carry a well-documented trajectory toward dependence, tolerance, and dangerous withdrawal.

When situational bridging is genuinely needed — a client with severe panic in the first three weeks of SSRI titration, a specific performance obligation, acute grief — RECO’s psychiatrists reach for hydroxyzine, gabapentin, or a short course of low-dose propranolol. These cover most use cases without the dependence trajectory and without disabling the exposure work.

Clients arriving on established benzodiazepine regimens are not stopped abruptly. A slow, structured taper — often on a diazepam equivalent — is layered with the SSRI ramp and the exposure protocol, so the taper coincides with a rising floor of anxiety tolerance rather than a cliff.

What the first visit and first week look like

The first visit is a two-hour comprehensive intake: psychiatric evaluation, therapy assessment, medical review, standardized measures, and insurance verification. Clients leave with a named DSM-5-TR diagnosis, a medication plan, a scheduled therapist assignment, and a target level of care based on ASAM Criteria for co-occurring substance use and on symptom severity for the anxiety disorder itself.

Within the first week, PHP clients attend five days of programming, six hours a day, with two individual sessions and a psychiatric follow-up. IOP runs three to five days a week, three hours per session. Exposure work typically begins in week two, once the diagnostic picture and the hierarchy are built. Family sessions are offered from week one where clinically indicated and consented to.

Insurance and admissions from West Palm Beach

RECO Health is in-network with Florida Blue, Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and BCBS plans, and works with most major commercial policies. Admissions runs benefits verification within one business day and gives residents of West Palm Beach a concrete out-of-pocket estimate before the intake appointment.

The 28-minute drive from downtown West Palm Beach makes PHP feasible without relocation for clients with home stability. For those who need residential support alongside outpatient anxiety care, RECO operates a gender-separate sober-living network within walking distance of the Delray campus.

Serving residents of: El Cid, Flamingo Park, Northwood Hills, SoSo, Downtown WPB.