If anyone has any papers or knowledge regarding any novel interventions that have suggested it is a preventative rather than remedial measure for combat stress or memories of traumatic events, I would be very grateful :)
Thanks
Holly
The U.S. Army has Mental Health Advisory Teams. If you conduct PsycInfo, Medline/PubMed, and Google searches on that name and on the names of researchers such as Jeffrey L. Thomas and Paul D. Bliese, I think you will find the information you are seeking.
Hi Holly,
I suggest you explore early and brief cognitive behavioral interventions e.g., Bryant and collaborators). After seeing that psychological debriefings were unable to prevent PTSD, early cognitive behavioral interventions were developed to be offered during the first days following trauma, in the hopes to help those who may develop stress acute reactions because this means high risk for developping PTSD.
This article may be helpful: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3665083/
Good luck and hard work! :-)
Soledad
One of the most novel of interventions is the effortless mental practice known as transcending, and taught by Transcendental Meditation, NSR, and a few other organizations. This technique dissolves that stress stored in the nervous system that is actually the root of the dysfunction. That is why transcending has been shown to be so effective as compared with drugs or talk therapy.
I know that research has shown a dramatic longtime effect for PTSD, and that some sort of investigations are being sponsored by the U.S. Veterans Administration and the United Nations, but I don't know any details.
If you want to know more about the research on TM, you might start at their website, which is www.tm.org .
Irvin, I'm not sure what you mean by meditation. There are thousands of different kinds of meditation, and they most certainly do not all help PTSD.
But, as for Transcendental Meditation, a specific mental technique, yes, there have been clinical trials. Veterans show a 50% reduction in PTSD symptoms after 8 weeks of Transcendental Meditation (source: http://www.tm.org/blog/research/veterans-ptsd).
Irvin, you can also check out the work of Dr. Herbert Bensen, who wrote "Relaxation Response," and later, after decades of research, "Relaxation Revolution."
I saw him speak about it at Harvard in 2012, and the research showed activity at the cellular level. The Q&A session quickly evolved over my hear as it went to the mitochondrial effects, and I was lost. Dr. Bensen however, without notes, answered every question in great detail.
Hi Holly,
Preventive measures for PTSD are tricky, mainly because the what stress on person won't stress another. Same with trauma. So since there is no standard, there is no standard for who will get PTSD, and to what extent.
However, our company exists partly due to that mission. people can develop that resilience. What humans are evolved to do is respond to stressful situations. What we have forgotten is exactly what that response is, and that's what I teach people.
I would suggest contacting Richmond Heath at www.treaustralia.com.au with that question. I know he presented before the parliament there some studies on treating PTSD.
The uncontrolled study by Rosenthal et al. in Military Medicine (Effects of transcendental meditation in veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom with posttraumatic stress disorder: a pilot study) had 5 veteran participants. Is a clinical trial that uses TM under way? I have an open mind. I would like to know about solid evidence that such an approach would help veterans.
Hi Irvin,
Though Bensen didn't use vets, he started with TM students at the very beginning of his research, as he states in the book. They were the first subjects that demonstrated a clear connection between what they were doing and a physical manifestation of it. He has a website, and a clinical center named after him in Boston now.
Based on my own PTSD, the approach of meditation would need to be altered, depending on the level of hyper-arousal and the subsequent inability to focus. I often recommend Headspace, and sometimes use a combo of Tiny Habits with 5 minutes of focusing on the breathing. The beauty is you can't think much while focusing on an autonomic function. Breathing is one such function, the only one over which we can exert control.
Check out Bensen's books as well. The recent one is based on 40 years of research. It will affect changes when done for 20 minutes regularly. Which takes time to get to, so I start really activated PTSD clients with 5 minutes, or less, to establish the habit.
R. Leckey Harrison, I will refrain from correcting mistakes in your understanding save to state that Benson learned about TM from his graduate student, Robert Keith Wallace, who was a TM teacher, and that breathing concentration prevents transcending. There is a big difference between the PTSD results achievable with TM and the results achievable through methods of concentration and contemplation.
But we don't have to agree on all this now. Research is in progress which should show clearly the superiority of transcending as an intervention for PTSD over all other methods, mental or otherwise, as a result of TM's proven effectiveness at dissolving stress stored in the nervous system in general.
Again, since such facts are as yet little-iknown, there is no need for me to try to convince anyone now; I'm content to wait for the research to be published within the next few years.
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