Erin Price, LICSW, OSW-C, Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, Washington, DC, shares the latest guidelines from ASCO and the Society of Integrative Oncology for the management of anxiety and depression among cancer survivors at the 2025 Academy of Oncology Nurse & Patient Navigators (AONN+) Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Price highlights the use of psychosocial interventions as first line options for patients rather than traditional pharmacology. Psychosocial interventions of note for patients include cognitive behavioral, mindfulness-based, and relaxation therapies.

Transcript:

Hi, I am Erin Price. I'm a clinical oncology social worker. I work at Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, which is a integrative cancer support nonprofit in Washington DC.

I have the pleasure of presenting as part of a larger integrative oncology panel at the upcoming AONN conference. As part of that panel, I will be talking about the anxiety and depression management guidelines that have been released in the last couple years by both ASCO and Society of Integrative Oncology (SIO) joint guidelines. These are clinical practice guidelines for the management of anxiety and depression in cancer survivors. We know that this is a really important topic because anxiety and depression, those rates do tend to be higher in people who've been diagnosed with cancer. 

We know that when you have anxiety and depression, sometimes that leads to worse outcomes in care or lack of adherence to treatment protocols. Also, we know that anxiety and oppression is often undertreated, but there is a lot of data, research, and tools around these topics of how we can support people better.

These clinical practice guidelines, there's 2 sets that are meant to be used in tandem, were released in 2023. The really interesting thing about the ASCO anxiety and depression guidelines is that they advocate for a stepped care model where you're going for the most effective and the least resource intensive intervention first, based on severity of the symptoms. The guidelines are organized by symptom severity, so mild, moderate, severe anxiety or depression, then following evidence-based protocol.

The most interesting thing to me is that they advocate for psychosocial interventions as the first line treatment and then pharmacology options as second line. Not necessarily jumping into medication, but first starting with education and referrals to mental health professionals for treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based interventions are highly recommended and endorsed. There's a lot of options in there for how do you help patients find something that works for them.

When we add in the SIO guidelines, they also advocate for mindfulness-based interventions and then other integrative modalities as well, such as yoga and relaxation therapies, reflexology, tai chi movement, and mindfulness. We have a lot of great tools that we can use for patients, both traditional pharmacology and what the evidence shows is that, actually these psychosocial interventions tend to be more effective as first line treatments.

I’m sharing that these guidelines exist and that they are great tools in decision analysis to help your patients manage anxiety and depression with cancer. I'm so excited to be at the conference. If you are there, I hope to see you. If not, I hope you'll get a chance to look at the guidelines.

Source:

Price E. Integrative Oncology in Practice: Whole-Person Approaches to Healing and Recovery. Presented at AONN+ Annual Conference; November 6-9, 2025. New Orleans, LA.