Suinn, Richard M.

I have been involved with anxiety interventions since the early 1960s, first examining ways of expediting desensitization therapy, then devising the brief-intervention anxiety management training (AMT), applied initially to anxiety treatment, then to anger management.

I was born on May 8, 1933, in Honolulu, Hawaii. I was raised in a multiethnic environment, attended St. Louis High School, and my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Hawaii. Although considering various science or medical majors at the university, the introductory psychology class, experience as a research subject, and volunteer work at the counseling center shifted my interest to psychology.

I was admitted to Ohio State University, arriving there by flying over the ocean, taking a train from the West Coast to the Midwest, then riding a trolley to the campus in Columbus, only to find the dormitories closed. A night's stay in the Ohio State football stadium on a cot may be the source of my later interest in sport psychology and removing stress.

Following the baccalaureate degree from Ohio State in 1955, I was accepted to the doctoral program at Stanford University, where I earned a master's degree in 1957 and the PhD in 1959. During the Stanford years, faculty and speakers were laying the theoretical foundations for behavior therapy, although assessment and intervention techniques had yet to be discovered. Instead, students were expected to learn traditional, nondirective, and psychodynamic approaches, along with acquiring ambivalence about the efficacy of such approaches. The release by Wolpe of his classic book on reciprocal inhibition (basic to desensitization therapy) influenced me to more seriously rely upon the learning theory foundation at Stanford. Later, an inability to provide help to an athlete with performance anxiety became the final precipitant for me to disengage from traditional psychotherapeutic theories or methods and to fully commit to behavioral approaches.

Professional models at Stanford University included C. Lee Winder and Albert Bandura, Leonard Krasner of the psychology department, and John D. Black, of Stanford University Counseling Center, for whom I worked. Brendan Maher was of great help in becoming involved with professional psychology activities, such as doing editorial reviews, serving on American Psychological Association (APA) Divisional committees, and book publishing. A series of personal contacts and readings impressed me with the relevance and value of operant approaches, such as the works of Ted Ayllon and Nate Azrin. Extremely valuable was viewing the use of operant methods for improving children's behaviors at the University of Washington Developmental Psychology Lab, which produced publications by Don Baer, Sid Bijou, Jay Birnbrauer, Todd Risley, and Montrose Wolf. A. Wayne Viney was the head of the Psychology Department at Colorado State University; he interviewed and hired me in 1968 and was my role model when I replaced him as department head. I served in this position for 20 years.

My major contributions include the design and development of anxiety/anger management training, a brief self-control procedure. AMT is unique in being effective for both anxiety and anger, in being applied by patients after termination to other new sources of stress or provocation, and in being useful for focused emotional states such as phobias or conditions where the source is ambiguous, such as in generalized [Page 574]anxiety disorder. AMT has also seen use with diverse populations, ranging from chronic schizophrenics, to medical outpatients, to hypertensive patients or persons facing stressful medical procedures, and to persons seeking to improve their performance by reducing stress, such as Olympic athletes and dance/music performers.

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