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Military Uses Virtual Iraq To Treat PTSD
Hugh Pickens writes "Traditionally the best treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] — being raped, narrowly escaping the collapse of the Twin Towers, or witnessing a buddy die on the battlefield — is to have the person relive the trauma using his or her imagination. Repeated exposure to the horror can desensitize individuals and help them stay calm enough to reprocess what happened and get beyond it. Now Clinical Psychologist Albert "Skip" Rizzo has developed a program that has had great success in treating returning troops from Iraq. A soldier with PTSD recounts what happened, and a therapist seated before a computer then creates an environment in the program Virtual Iraq that captures the essential elements of the episode. By donning special goggles, the soldier can see a reenactment and while the simulation starts off relatively tame over the course of several weeks, the therapist monitors the patient 's response and more elements of the episode are introduced until the individual can finally go through an intensely vivid recreation of it without being overpowered by terror. Other programs offered to treat PTSD include Virtual Airplane, Virtual Audiences, Virtual Heights, Virtual Storm, and Virtual Vietnam."
The problem is that the individual is likely to suffer from flashbacks whenever similar simple events happen in the real world. If they are walking down the street, and hear a loud noise such as a car backfiring, a container door being slammed, or some construction work, it would trigger those memories causing them to freeze-up, get angry or be unhappy.
The idea of this treatment is to desensitize them to these events so that those memories aren't triggered.
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I was doing research on PTSD a few years back for personal reasons. The studies I found were quite shocking to say the least. PTSD isn't just caused by being on the battle field or having one major traumatic event happen. Most of the things people go to therapists for; depression, anxiety, trust issues, etc. are all symptoms of milder forms of trauma. It's all PTSD. Dr. Amen, one of the leading psychiatrists in the world on brain scanning technology has scanned thousands of people. The scans he does sense chemical-electric activity in the brain. What he's found is very, very few people actually have healthy brain activity; most people have suffered from trauma. The general populace seems to see it though as "that's life" rather than seeing mental illness as the plague of humanity. Mental illness is truly a disease as it's contagious; people tend to reenact their trauma and in doing so traumatize others. And most treatment is laughable to say the least. Different types of treatment were tested on Viet Nam vets. The combination of talk or cognitive therapy with pharmacolatherapy and relaxation exercises only had a 15% recovery rate.Then I discovered a fairly new therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement, Desensitization & Reprocessing). It was developed and has been tested since the mid-80's. The recovery rate was far higher; 85% of all patience diligently engaged in weekly sessions recovered. So the question is, why isn't there more media coverage of this? Why aren't more therapists trained in something that actually works?