USF investigates eye-movement therapy for PTSD

When it comes to PTSD everything is "helpful" except denial. As soon as veterans start seeking help for PTSD, it stops getting worse, at least for a while. With the right kind of help focusing on body-mind-spirit, healing is a lifetime experience. With the wrong kind of help, that lifetime is too often cut short.

Some consider alcohol and drug abuse as helpful but that does not mean they are getting better by getting numb. Some methods leave them feeling temporary relief but that can fade, they feel it all over again and then, then they just give up. What works for a friend including medication, may not work for them so they think there is something "wrong" with them instead of understanding that while the combat experience may have been similar, their body chemistry is not. Their history is not the same. Their emotional strengths are not the same any more than they way they look at the world.

Getting help helps but all things that "help" are not created equally.

USF investigates eye-movement therapy for PTSD
Tampa Bay Times
Jodie Tillman, Times Staff Writer
Sunday, February 2, 2014

TAMPA — Sent to fight in Afghanistan, Brian Anderson killed a man for the first time in 2009. He helped load two slain buddies into body bags. Ran low on rounds as Taliban fighters attacked. Heard a dying local man scream for Allah.

Only a few years later, the former Green Beret was a suburban husband and father, physically uninjured but struggling with the psychic fallout of war.

Some days he locked himself in the bedroom to avoid his family. He swore he saw his two dead friends on the street. He passed open doorways and felt his chest tighten and his heart race as if he still had to brace for sudden attack.

Now 31, the Pasco County man tried one of the standard talk therapies used for post-traumatic stress disorder, with only initial success. Last June, he heard that University of South Florida researchers were studying a different approach.

Called "accelerated resolution therapy," or ART, it has patients think about their traumatic memories while watching the therapist's hands move back and forth. That part is similar to another eye-movement therapy. ART adds a second part to the session by asking patients to replace their traumatic memories with new, positive mental images.

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, is a third approach, developed in the late 1980s and now approved by the Department of Veterans Affairs. It requires a patient to focus on a therapist's finger moving back and forth while recalling the traumatic memory. The idea here, too, is to make the memory less potent.

No one can say for certain what the eye movement does. Some theorize it provokes a state of relaxation that mimics deep sleep, allowing patients to finally process traumatic memories the way they do nontraumatic memories.

Skeptics say it's the talking portion of the therapy — not the eye movement — that is effective.
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