Approaches to the Treatment of PTSD
Posted in PTSD on 10/19/2010 12:51 pm by davidauthors:
Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D., Onno van der Hart, Ph.D., Jennifer Burbridge, M.A.
Originally appeared in S. Hobfoll & M. de Vries (Eds.), Extreme stress and communities: Impact and intervention (NATO Asi Series. Series D, Behavioural and Social Sciences, Vol 80). Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic. Note that this online version may have minor differences from the published version.
Trauma Clinic
227 Babcock Street
Brookline, MA 02146
Associate Professor of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School
Introduction
Terrifying experiences that rupture people’s sense of predictability and invulnerability can profoundly alter the ways that they subsequently deal with their emotions and with their environment. The syndrome of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can follow such widely different stressors as war trauma, physical and sexual assaults, accidents, and other natural and man-made disasters. Mirroring the confusion and disbelief of people whose basic assumptions are shattered by traumatic experiences, the psychiatric profession periodically has been fascinated by trauma, followed by sudden disbelief in the importance of trauma in the genesis of psychopathlogy. Over the past decade our profession has experienced the third intense wave of efforts to grasp the reality of trauma on body and soul, after the first at the Salpetriere during the closing decades of the 19th century, and the second, spearheaded by Abram Kardiner (1941), in the 1940s. The findings about the consequences of trauma and what constitutes effective treatment have been extraordinarily consistent over these 120 years.