In today's Staff Perspective, Carin Lefkowitz and Andy Santanello discuss a recent article [Szafranski, D. D., Smith, B. N., Gros, D. F., & Resick, P. A. (2017). High rates of PTSD treatment dropout: A possible red herring?
We here at the Center for Deployment Psychology are excited to unveil the new Evidence-Based Psychotherapies video section on our website. As part of our multi-day EBP training events, we use many videos to demonstrate a variety of techniques. One of the most common request we receive is participants wanting the opportunity to watch these videos again afterwards to help reinforce the concepts. Now those interested can watch (and re-watch) all these video demonstrations whenever they want.
Recently I was invited to attend a lecture by LTC (Ret.) Dave Grossman titled “The Psychological Effect of Combat.” I knew of LTC Grossman because so many of my military clients raved about his books, On Killing and On Combat. I was intrigued to see him speak, but was also quite skeptical about his message and expected to disagree with him at every turn.
Over the last several years there has been an increased emphasis on providing evidence-based psychotherapies (EBPs) in military and Veteran healthcare environments to treat PTSD. The Institute of Medicine (2007) produced a report indicating that the DoD and VA lacked evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of the treatments they are providing. The report was not suggesting the treatments themselves were not effective, but simply that both the VA and DoD did not have a system in place for measuring the effectiveness of the treatment in those environments. Further inquiry in a variety of studies indicated that only a small portion of individuals diagnosed with PTSD even received EBPs.
To “group” or not to “group”…. Have you ever found yourself asking that question as a provider? There is, of course, the general concept of group theory and what patients work best in a group and those that don’t. It can be easy to spot people who will not interact with others well, to one extreme or the other. But it can be harder as a provider to determine the more intricate question of what type of behavioral health problem can be better served in a group format instead of individual.