Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Analysis

In today 's society, there is a great deal of research and practice about evidence based practice. Most of this is highly sought upon in the field of psychology, where evidence and decision making is key to accomplishing new ideas of treatments for people who retain psychiatric problems. The meaning of evidence-based practice in psychology is that it involves making very educated and supported decisions based on punctilious, unambiguous, and astute evidence (Rousseau & Gunia, 2016). With evidence-based practice, it assists in raising and deriving the issue of what evidence really is, the strength of the evidence, and how practitioners can improve the quality of their evidence (Rousseau & Gunia, 2016). Evidence is a major factor because it may either enhance or hinder the practitioner 's ability to make decisions and construct their practices on patients (Rousseau & Gunia, 2016). Evidence-based practice began in the 1980 's with the goal to combine the practices of scientific evidence with physician education and clinical practice. The issue with this was that medical schools did not have the ability to teach their own specific approaches to clinical problems (Rousseau & Gunia, 2016). As an effect to this cause, three main issues quickly arose about the effectiveness and quality of evidence-based practice. First, since other fields were advancing growth in

Cook, Walser, Kane, and Woody (2006) did a study that had a goal of getting clinicians to accept Seeking Safety and evaluate its efficacy when treating veterans, in hopes of bridging the gap of parallel services at the VA to treat comorbid SUD-PTSD. This study reinforced the old ways of "cannot teach an old dog new tricks" because of how difficult it is to influence clinician behavior in routine medical care. A more passive approach was taken via a daylong interactive staff training in Seeking Safety, where clinicians were informally surveyed on their willingness to co-lead groups with the study. Four therapists volunteered. And thus, four Seeking Safety groups were formed with 25 veteran volunteers whom had comorbid SUD-PTSD. Of those, 18

Using the Google Scholar search engine, the phrase “OIF OEF veterans struggle for care” yielded 2100 articles between the years 2000 to 2016.  Of the 2100 articles, only 2 articles supported the current research topic. Using the phrase “OIF OEF veterans’ barriers for not seeking treatment” yielded 3,180 results. Specifiers such as changing the years from 2008 to 2016 and adding citations and patents yielded 2960 articles. Amongst the 2960 articles, 5 articles were selected following screening. These articles were considered relevant to the current research topic. Of the 9,277 articles yielded in the overall research, 9 articles were used in conducting research supporting the barriers that OIF/OEF veterans face when seeking treatment for PTSD

Integrated treatment programs along with evidence supporting its effectiveness are later brought up in this article, along with recent policy changes from the Department of Veteran Affairs predicting future positive outcomes of PTSD/SUD treatment.

As awareness grows relating to the mental health problems of those who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), much of the focus has been on providing adequate and effective care to the newest population of combat veterans. Although efforts have significantly increased with the employment of Evidence Based Practices (EBP) and while the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Veterans Healthcare Administration (VHA), have updated their clinical practice guidelines, barriers remain and reaching the majority of this particular population remains a challenge.

With further growth in Psychiatric care and the American Psychiatric Association(APA) in the 1950’s and some later in the 1960’s, APA crated the DSM I/II (Diagnostic and Statistical Mental Disorders). With huge amounts of Vietnam Veterans interviews and further research in the 1980’s the psychological symptoms of PTSD were caused and created by the traumatic events of war time. There are still gray areas as to how to prevent this in war time and how to treat such a problem once one has it, but there is still ongoing research to this day. They are now up to the DSM 5 and are constantly researching these psychological problems. Such things like processing, classes, and psychological evaluations happen before release back to civilian life has been made for returning veterans in efforts to lessen the number of effected Veterans.

To effectively treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD in combat Veterans and service members, therapists use different techniques, which are preceded by addressing any underlying pain associated with the disorder. In their research, Chard et al. (2011) reported significant modifications to the CPT protocol for use with patients in a TBI-PTSD residential treatment facility, including increasing the number of sessions per week, combining group and individual therapy, and augmenting the treatment with cognitive rehabilitation. However, their research was marred with the use of few participants which provides doubts regarding the outcome of the proposed treatment procedures. Moreover, the researchers do not state with certainty as to the

A frequent therapeutic option for mildly to moderately affected PTSD patients is group therapy, although empirical support for this is sparse. In such a setting, the PTSD patient can discuss traumatic memories, PTSD symptoms, and functional deficits with others who have had similar experiences. This approach has been most successful with war Veterans, rape/incest victims, and natural disaster survivors. It is important that therapeutic goals be realistic because, in some cases, PTSD is a chronic, complex (e.g., with many comorbid diagnoses and symptoms), and severely debilitating psychiatric disorder that does not always respond to current available treatments. Resick, Nishith, and Griffin (2003) have shown however, that very good outcomes

Seeking Safety provides clients with psychoeducation and teaches them to use adaptive coping skills to manage the symptoms of their disorders and associated consequences and the demands of recovery from these disorders (Boden et al., 2014). Seeking Safety is an evidence-based, present-focused therapy that is designed to help clients explore links between PTSD and substance use without having clients explore into specific details regarding their experience of PTSD. This intervention will help combat veterans achieve safety in their relationships, thinking, behavior and emotions. It can also be conducted in a group, or on an individual

PTSD is formally known as Post- traumatic Stress Disorder. It can be a very self harming and hurtful disorder. In an article by Melinda Smith, M.A., Lawrence Robinson, and Jeanne Segal they say PTSD is caused by traumatic events that threatened your safety or made you feel helpless. Other causes for PTSD are war, rape, kidnapping, and assault, sudden death of a loved one and much more. Everyone can be get PTSD and it is not just focused on war vets. Based on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affair they state that 8% of the U.S. population will have PTSD at some point in their lives, they also state that 10% of women are more to get it then 4%. There are many different symptoms of PTSD and once they are acknowledged there are ways to treat

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a widespread disorder that affects certain individuals psychologically, behaviorally, and emotionally following the experience of a traumatic event (Lee et al., 2005, p. 135). However, because of inconsistencies regarding the percentage of individuals who experience PTSD and the percentage of individuals who subsequently develop PTSD, researchers hypothesize that both biological and environmental factors contribute to the development of PTSD (Wolf et al. 2010, p. 328). In order gain a better understanding of this disorder and to discover contributing and predicative factors which contribute to the development of PTSD, this paper analyses the historical context and prevalence of PTSD, the

Two studies analyzed the efficacy of group- based exposure therapy. Ready et al. (2012) held three groups of ten participants with primarily war related induced PTSD. (Ready et al., 2012). Castillo et al. (2012) study treated 77 woman veterans with primarily sexual abuse related PTSD. All patients were selected from local VA clinics in the southern United States. DiMauro performed a meta- analysis on 26 studies, with an average gruop size of 5 participants, to determine the efficacy of exposure therapy in treating PTSD (DiMauro, 2014). All studies

Regardless of the career or social engagements, individuals are always prone to traumatic events that change the perception of the world. The impact of the traumatic event lasts for varied time periods depending on several factors such as the capacity of an individual to absorb stress. Although traumatic events are great a result of war and any activity threatening life, there are several factors that amount to a traumatic event. Post-traumatic stress disorder can be described as a psychological response in regard to the experience resulting from intense traumatic events and more so those events that threaten life. Post-traumatic stress disorder can affect individuals across diverse groups of age, gender, and culture. Although the concept of

The proposed research question asks whether a combined prolonged exposure (PE) and cognitive processing therapy (CPT) approach is useful in treating veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The population of interest for this study is veterans with PTSD. The ideal study would include four groups: one to receive PE, one to receive CPT, one to receive both PE and CPT, and one that does not receive an intervention. The groups would consist of an equal 50/50 male to female ratio (half of the participants would be male, half would be female) to control for gender. The participants would be randomly selected, by a computerized program, based on information gathered about veterans with PTSD by the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs offices in each of the 23 regions of the Veterans Integrated Service Networks (VISN). Once selected, the veterans will be randomly placed into one of the four aforementioned groups, and given the Posttraumatic Cognitions Inventory (PTCI), a scale used to measure a person’s trauma related to their thoughts and beliefs to determine if they have PTSD or PTSD symptoms. After the participants baseline PTSD symptoms are measured, each group will receive their assigned intervention once a week for 15 weeks. After the intervention is complete the participant’s PTSD symptoms will again be measured using the PTCI scale at the one week and three month mark after treatment is completed. The control group will also be offered the combined PE and CPT

In this scholarly article the author addresses the topic of emotional numbing and how it is a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) seen as a loss of interest in usually enjoyable activities, feeling detached from others, and an inability to express a full range of feelings of love, hate, fear, etc. Emotional numbing is usually tested/evaluated through self-report, and is especially very hard to check among young children. The experimenters conducted a pilot study to explore the use of facial expression ratings in response to a comedy video clip to evaluate emotional ability or likelihood to do something in response to something else among preschool children directly exposed to the Great East Japan Earthquake. This study included 23