{"id":41594,"date":"2018-05-03T21:47:16","date_gmt":"2018-05-03T21:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/militarytimes\/uncategorized\/2018\/05\/03\/emerging-ptsd-therapy-faster-results-less-talking\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T06:18:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T06:18:56","slug":"emerging-ptsd-therapy-faster-results-less-talking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/militarytimes\/news\/2018\/05\/03\/emerging-ptsd-therapy-faster-results-less-talking\/","title":{"rendered":"Emerging PTSD therapy: Faster results, less talking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Brian Anderson can remember every single detail of the day two of his friends were killed in Afghanistan on Sept. 29, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it haunted him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he returned home from deployment, he starting having panic attacks. He would see his friend\u2019s face in the car driving next to him and imagined bullets going through his own head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was just tormented on the inside,\u201d said Anderson, 36, a former Army Green Beret and National Guardsman. \u201cI was isolating. I was pushing my family further away, all those kind of things.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anderson was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and tried various forms of therapy, in which he would talk about his memories of the experience with a therapist. Nothing worked long-term, though, he said, and whenever he talked about the day he lost his friends, Calvin and Mark, he felt himself getting angry and hypervigilant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But not anymore. Since trying accelerated resolution therapy, an emerging treatment for PTSD that requires fewer sessions than traditional forms of therapy and doesn\u2019t require patients to talk out loud about their experiences, Anderson is able to share the story of that September day without getting agitated. As he recounts details of what he said and did just moments before Calvin and Mark were killed, he no longer gets angry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m not attacked by the historical emotional reaction that I (had) back then,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the goal of accelerated resolution therapy, or ART, which was developed a decade ago and has been used by some in the military community to treat PTSD for several years. While it\u2019s still a lesser-known psychotherapy method, a growing body of research points to its positive effects on people with post-traumatic stress, which include 11 to 20 percent of the Iraq and Afghanistan-era veteran population, according to Veterans Affairs Department estimates. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an article in the Military Medicine journal last month, researchers from the University of South Florida note that the treatment can be particularly appealing to service members and veterans because of its brevity and format. In contrast to some of the more commonly used forms of PTSD therapy that take several weeks or months, studies have shown ART to be effective in an average of about four sessions. And instead of talking to a therapist, patients who go through ART don\u2019t have to verbalize or even write down the details of their traumatic experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis can be relevant to service members and veterans with exposure to classified operations and those who do not wish to share details of highly emotional experiences involving shame or guilt, such as those involving combat losses and sexual trauma,\u201d write researchers Kevin Kip and David Diamond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Army veteran Brian Anderson tried other treatments for PTSD before discovering accelerated resolution therapy in 2013. He now runs a nonprofit to help other combat veterans access the therapy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve had people that haven\u2019t told me a word about (their trauma) \u2014 honest to God,\u201d said Brenda Stutler, an Orlando-based mental health counselor who uses ART in her practice and is also certified to train others how to use the therapy. \u201cThey leave my office and I have no idea what we just processed. It doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In ART, a therapist will direct a patient to think about a scene he or she wants to process and identify the beginning, middle and end. Then, the therapist waves a hand from side to side, stimulating rapid eye movements as the patient thinks about the traumatic event. After a couple rounds, the patient is told to imagine their scene happening the way they would have preferred \u2014 that Anderson\u2019s friends had made it back to base with him, for example \u2014 as a way to weaken the original memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ART teaches the brain to separate traumatic events from their associated emotions, Stutler said. \u201cIt\u2019s like changing the images in your mind into a narrative, and it gets filed away as a narrative instead of the images which have emotions attached to them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Military Medicine article, Kip and Diamond evaluated four studies done on ART, three of which focused on service members and veterans. In their analysis of more than 200 people who had completed the treatment, they found nearly 75 percent experienced a clinically significant reduction in symptoms associated with PTSD. <\/p>\n\n\n\t