Veterans Charity claims 68% PTSD healed in a week?

Local veteran puts on Gala for Warrior Camp
New Hampshire.com
By MEGHAN PIERCE
Union Leader Correspondent
July 20, 2014

Warrior Camp alum Jennifer Pacanowski of Allentown, Pennsylvania, reads poetry she wrote to express her challenges with PTSD at the 1st annual Warrior Camp Gala in Jaffrey Saturday. Meghan Pierce

JAFFREY — Saturday night’s Warrior Camp Gala at the Shattuck Golf Club raised about $10,000 to support the treatment of active military members and veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Warrior Camp founder Eva J. Usadi of New York City told gala attendees the intensive one-week program was created to save lives. Every day one active military member commits suicide, she said, and the suicide rate is even higher in the veteran population in which 22 veterans commit suicide a day.

Warrior Camp is held a few times a year at Touchstone Farm in Temple. But Usadi is hoping to raise funds to build a full-time facility for Warrior Camp in New York eventually.

There are three components to Warrior Camp, Usadi said: equine assisted psychotherapy, yoga and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy.

PTSD is a physical and biological reaction to trauma that cannot be properly treated through talk therapy and medication, Usadi said.

Because of their approach, Usadi said 68 percent of the participants who arrive at Warrior Camp with chronic PTSD no longer meet that diagnosis by the end of the week.

Graduates of the camp have urged Usadi to add a fourth component to the program: community.

“They train together. They live together and they go to war together in very tightly knit units and some of the people have said we have created that feeling again that nobody has had since they had been discharged,” Usadi said.
read more here