PTSD Prolonged Exposure To More Harm?

We keep talking about how long all of these "projects" have been researched, done, failed and then redone over and over again, but in the following article there is a fabulous reminder of what Wounded Times readers already know.

"In 1991, Roger Pitman, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, discontinued a pilot study of six Vietnam veterans treated with a technique similar to prolonged exposure, known as imaginal flooding, that resulted in two of the patients becoming suicidal and a third breaking 19 months of sobriety. Other patients became severely depressed or began suffering panic attacks between treatment sessions. The results were so unexpected that Pitman conducted a larger study using 20 Vietnam veterans as subjects, published in 1996 in Comprehensive Psychiatry, and found similar outcomes."

Yep, that long, even longer if you are new to Wounded Times.

Trauma Post Trauma
The “gold standard” treatment for PTSD makes many vets’ symptoms even worse.
Slate.com
By David J. Morris

Medics carry a soldier hit by an IED in 2011 in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Photo by Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is the world leader in research on post-traumatic stress disorder. No organization spends more money or expends more resources to treat it than the VA. Yet its efforts to stamp out the disorder, which afflicts upward of 30 percent of veterans today and is the fourth most common mental health condition in the world, are often strikingly wasteful and driven by shoddy science. In 2006, the VA began treating veterans with a form of therapy charmingly known as prolonged exposure. It is now a central piece in the VA’s war on PTSD and its most popular type of individual psychotherapy. Prolonged exposure is heavily promoted by the VA, which describes it as the “gold standard” treatment for PTSD.

Prolonged exposure therapy works roughly like this: After taking a brief inventory of the patient’s military service, the therapist asks the veteran to recount the story of his or her worst trauma over and over and over again with eyes closed until the memory of it becomes “habituated,” losing its traumatic charge and becoming like any other normal autobiographical memory. The typical course of treatment lasts about eight weeks and, according to Marsden McGuire, the deputy consultant for mental health care standards at the VA, produces some improvement in 60 percent of veterans who undergo it.

The problem with prolonged exposure is that it also has made a number of veterans violent, suicidal, and depressed, and it has a dropout rate that some researchers put at more than 50 percent, the highest dropout rate of any PTSD therapy that has been widely studied so far.
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