EMDR therapy and traumatic experiences

[andrew_plamondon]

I think it might intesrest some of you. I'm doing a assignment on a therapeutic approach and I chose EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). For those that don't know what it is, it's essentialy a really short term therapy (usually only 3 sessions) in which the therapist makes you talk about the traumatic experience and while you do so, he moves his fingers from right to left to activate different regions of the brain so that you can actually integrate the information that relates to the trauma. In this view, the problems would be caused by the fact that there's a bad integration of the trauma in the memory.

That's a short description but feel free to ask questions and I'll try to dig in !
That's a treatment that is scientifically proven and suggested for those with post-traumatic stress disorder (I think it was the first therapy scientifically proven to work for this problem) and in general it can help people with anxiety problem and a whole lot of other problems.

Some quotes from an article :

Repeating the process of activation, multilayered focal attention, encoding, reactivation, and encoding would reorganize the memory into a more tolerable, integrated, and perhaps resolved configuration that no longer has such devastating effects on the flexibility of the system’s flow of states.

The process of integrating the modalities from the left and from the right hemispheres may enable traumatic memories to be processed in a new way, one that fosters resolution.

[skim]

I was just talking about this the other day! A few years back, I learned about it on 60 min or 20/20 or some other news magazine show, and its use w/ war vets. What's the success rate? And how effective is it long term? I'm also wondering, does it just get the client to the point of managing the issue or does the issue actually become a non-issue after treatment?

[andrew_plamondon]

The studies were mostly done with PTSD problems so far but there are some studies being done for other problems. As far as the current litterature goes, I'd say that most of the studies come to the conclusion that in 80 to 100% of the cases, there is a significant improvement and most of the time, EMDR is more effective than any other therapy in treating PTSD.

The supposed mecanism of EMDR is that it helps the person resolve the emotional problem that makes it impossible for him to incorporate the traumatic experience as part of his experience, as if the trauma was "stuck" in and felt like it was always in the present. So it's a short-term solution that has impacts on the long term. In fact, most of the time, there is improvement after the treatment but when they test the person 6 months, a year later, they noticed that there was MORE improvement without having to work with a therapist.
Every long term reaction can vary from person to person though, but in general, the results are just incredible for such a short-term approach. It's a new approach though, more research is needed so that it becomes widely accepted but it already is accepted as the best treatment for PTSD.

[Marykaa]

very interesting.. I'll surely google on "Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing" to find out more about it.

thanks for posting this.

[galya]

I've been using it as a part of EFT and I think it's awesome that we have quick and easy approaches like that. It's easy to learn and apply. You just have to keep using it.
With EFT I have found that most things become non-issues or you stay aware of them logically, but become emotionally detatched and have 0 feelings about them.

[BFG]

how do they measure success because surely with something like this its very much a case of personal subjectivity for want of a better word?

Havent read up on it yet but skeptical until I see more, do you have a a link to the article? always open to new ideas and thoughts

[andrew_plamondon]

The measure of outcome is always subject to debate. There are many questionnaires that were developed to measure the outcome of a therapy and they can be on many variables. I think that one of the usual measure of outcome is to see if the numbers of symptoms that fit the diagnosis for PTSD went down, if distress or anxiety went down and so on.

There's a website on EMDR and there's a part on efficacy :
http://www.emdr.com/efficacy.htm