Australian Association for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy – 2025 Annual Update

By Peter Pohlman

The President of the Australian Association for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (AACBT) is Professor Ross G Menzies, University of Technology Sydney. 2024 saw a solid return to in-person event attendance; AACBT continued to grow our registrations, especially for our scientific conference. We look forward to continuing our growth throughout our broader community throughout 2025; we will continue to pursue our vision of improving the quality of practice of behavioural and cognitive therapies in Australasia, by providing high quality professional development in behavioural and cognitive therapies based on scientific evaluation.

Throughout 2024, we hosted a mixture of local and international presenters, plus webinar recordings continued to be made available for free to members. These webinars represent over 20 hours of high-quality content, plus associated readings, and materials. Examples of some of the topics included in our online catalogue include OCD, repetitive thinking, sleep, ADHD, iCBT, alexithymia and social anxiety disorder. The face-to-face events saw over 1,500 people booked to attend, covering a broad range of topics, including ADHD, self-compassion, eating disorders, PTSD, perfectionism, schema therapy and dissociative identity disorder.

Our 44th National Conference featured a wide range of keynote and invited speakers for AACBT, all of whom were featured in this role for the first time. We had record bookings and attendance for a conference hosted in Brisbane. The feedback from our exit survey was very positive – an average star rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars. We had 93.75% respond with agree or strongly agree that the professional development provided was valuable to their needs, and 91.07% responded that they acquired new knowledge/skills. The National Board thanks our host Branch committee for their ongoing efforts, and the National Conference Committee for their conference work.

We continued to offer our National Award program, and each recipient presented at the 2024 national conference, highlighting their scientific output and contemporary research. The 2024 award winners were Dr. Madelyne Bisby (early career) and Professor Viviana Wuthrich (mid-career). In 2025, AACBT is expanding our award program to include an outstanding practitioner award.

Our 45th conference is scheduled for 16-18 October 2025 in Fremantle/Walyalup, WA. The Board thanks our National Conferences Director for their service in supervising our largest annual event, and we are excited to be featuring our keynote presenters Judith S. Beck, Pat Dudgeon, Liz Pellicano and other invited speakers.

In the interests of promoting equity of access, the AACBT Board is continuing to provide free membership for all AACBT student memberships – this now sees AACBT with nearly 1,000 student members.

In 2024, the AACBT Board oversaw the transition to our new website, which provides a smoother, and more contemporary service to our members and customers. We host various member documents, our historic national conference programs, plus our extensive e-library.

AACBT would like to acknowledge our Fellows: Professor Peter Lovibond, Professor Michael Kyrios, Professor Matthew Sanders, Professor Colin MacLeod, Professor Tracey Wade, Professor Ross Young, Professor Mark Dadds, Professor Mark Creamer, Professor Kim Halford, Professor Nicole Lee, Associate Professor Sarah Egan, Professor Louise Sharpe, Associate Professor Neville King, Professor Leanne Hides, Professor Ross G Menzies, Adjunct Professor Amanda Baker, Ms. Natasha Davis, and Emeritus Professor Susan Spence. We thank them for their continuing contributions to the CBT community in Australia, and assisting AACBT throughout the year. The Board would especially like to thank Professor Tracey Wade for participating as our World CBT Ambassador for 2024 with her presentation on perfectionism.