Vets Who Repress Traumatic Memories May Not Be Worse Off

Knowing the way the blog world has reacted to articles like this, I'm sure you're about to see this headline all over the place, so I decided that I would post the rest of the report they will probably not even pay attention to. Also notice that this study does not in anyway, shape or form, dismiss PTSD or suggest talking about it is not a good thing. It only implies that in some cases, not talking about it is not always going to make it worse,,,,,this part,,,more has to be done on.

Vets Who Repress Traumatic Memories May Not Be Worse Off
06.19.09, 04:00 PM EDT
New study finds they fared as well as those who unearthed the pain


FRIDAY, June 19 (HealthDay News) -- Veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may not be plagued by poor health and shortened lives if they repress their combat experiences, new research suggests.

"The finding goes against the grain," acknowledged study author and Vietnam army veteran Joseph Boscarino, a senior investigator at the Geisinger Center for Health Research in Danvillle, Pa. "Because the concept that talking about your trauma and analyzing your fears and emotions is always the best policy goes back to Sigmund Freud, and for decades it's kind of been taken as a given."

"But this has never really been truly validated," Boscarino noted, "and it may be an overgeneralization. And we found that in some cases not talking about it and actually repressing traumatic thoughts and experiences may not translate into a more adverse outcome."

Dr. Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD, took a cautious view of the findings.

"Over the last 10 to 15 years, we've found how complex memory really is," he said. "And I don't think that there is any longer a widely held belief in the classic psychoanalytic theory that suggests that somehow if you suppress your stress and angst that the distress will manifest itself in negative symptoms."

"Certainly, difficulty in retrieving memories can be adaptive and promote good health and longer life in some cases, and can be maladaptive in others," noted Friedman, who is also a professor in Dartmouth Medical School's department of psychiatry and department of pharmacology and toxicology. "But this paper suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. The notion of 'repression' connotes different things to different people. The concept is fuzzy. So the authors should be commended for opening up a very interesting line of inquiry. But at the same time I think we need to be very, very careful about how we interpret these results."
go here for more
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/hscout/2009/06/19/hscout628249.html