Best Treatment Practices for PTSD Deemed “Uncertain”

These are major and important issues.  The VA’s publicized use of – and even dependence on – exposure therapy for PTSD treatment may in fact be insufficient and insufficiently defined.  The IOM report recognizes that most therapeutic interventions for PTSD (such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT) will involve some variant of re-exposure to trauma-related memories or stimuli.  The CBT treatment goal is to reframe the trauma experience in order to help patients express and manage emotions relating to the trauma incident.  This report addresses the overlap between current definitions of “exposure therapy” and CBT as well as other modalities including hypnosis, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) – which is not unlike a form of wakeful hypnosis – and neither one alone or in combination with medication has been sufficiently documented to be the most effective form of treatment.

There is great debate on how much any type of therapy may be parsed out into separate categories to delineate the “best” method.  This includes therapy techniques as well as medications.

Everyone is different, and like all other mental illnesses, one size will never fit all.  The attention given to PTSD is vital to the continuing political and policy discussions on how to best serve our military veterans and their mental health concerns.

To view the prepublication of the study online, go to:

http://lab.nap.edu/nap-cgi/discover.cgi?term=ptsd%20%20effectiveness&restric=NAP.  If you scroll down the page, you will find a link to read a summary of the report.