PTSD Anxiety Treatment

A clinically-diagnosed anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, affects individuals who have been exposed to severely traumatic events, such as warfare, terrorism and natural disasters. People can also develop PTSD as a result of childhood trauma, anxiety or depressive disorders, neuroticism and over-reactive tendencies.

Types

• Regardless of theoretical basis, most treatments for PTSD involve patient exposure to fear-evoking stimuli. Some specific treatment methods include behavioral therapies like imaginal exposure treatment, cognitive processing therapy and other psychotherapies, as well as psychoactive drug treatment.

Features

• Imaginal exposure treatment primarily focuses on patient visualization of trauma-connected images for prolonged time periods. Cognitive processing therapy, in contrast, directs PTSD patients toward counteracting mistaken beliefs and self-blaming thoughts about the traumatic event.

Timelines

• Some PTSD treatments focus on the period immediately following a trauma, such as the critical incident stress debriefing (CISD). CISD therapy involves one long session within 72 hours of the traumatic event, with a focus on helping individuals express their feelings about what they have experienced.

Effects

• Most patients receiving exposure treatment following a traumatic event show improvement over time. Many other PTSD treatments, though, have had mixed outcomes, and psychoactive medication treatments have proven to be less successful than exposure treatments.

Considerations

• A number of treatment options for PTSD remain highly controversial, including critical incident stress debriefing. Another treatment lacking solid empirical support is that of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), which involves visualization of the traumatic event combined with movement tracking between the patient and therapist.