Facing Your Fears: Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (FYF:IDD)

Moving an Adapted CBT Intervention for Autistic Adolescents with Anxiety from the Research Lab to a Clinical Setting 

Principal Investigator: Audrey Blakeley-Smith, PhD
COMIRB 25-0275    
Funding: Department of Psychiatry, CUSOM, 1/1/2025 – 12/31/2025 

Research Team: 

Lisa Hayutin, PhD; Allison T. Meyer, PhD; and Audrey Blakeley-Smith, PhD 

What is the goal of the study?  

We recently completed a 3-year study funded by the Department of Defense that evaluated the effectiveness of  Facing Your Fears: Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (FYF:IDD), a CBT program designed to help autistic teens with intellectual disabilities manage their anxiety.

• Teens who took part in the intervention showed meaningful improvements in their anxiety, mood, and behavior.
• Our next step is to see how well this program works when it is used by clinicians outside of our research team.
• We want to know if a training workshop on FYF:IDD and our intervention manual are clear, easy to follow, and useful for delivering the intervention as intended.
• We also want to hear directly from families about what they find helpful and what could be improved.
• Our long-term goal is to support families of autistic teens with intellectual disability to have better access to evidence-based mental health support for anxiety and emotion regulation.  

What did we do?  

In July 2025, we held a one-day workshop and trained 5 psychologists and 3 psychology interns/fellows to use the FYF:IDD intervention. This fall, 9 families joined FYF:IDD groups within Developmental Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital Colorado.  Both clinicians and families will be sharing feedback to our research team about what works well and what could be improved. We’ll also be looking at how much the program helps reduce teen anxiety and improve emotion regulation.  

Why is this important?  

There are very few evidence-based mental health resources in our community for autistic teens with intellectual disability. Clinicians often struggle to help autistic teens with intellectual disability manage their anxiety because there aren’t manualized, ready-to-use programs designed for this population. By gathering feedback from both clinicians and families about FYF:IDD, we can make sure FYF:IDD is practical, effective, and accessible so that more families can benefit from this tailored anxiety CBT intervention.

Next Steps?  

We will examine feedback from clinicians and families on the intervention and then incorporate this feedback into a revision of the FYF:IDD treatment manual.   

Please email Audrey Blakeley-Smith, PhD for more information about the study.