
A Revolutionary Approach to Treating PTSD (2014) - agronaut
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/magazine/a-revolutionary-approach-to-treating-ptsd.html?_r=0
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heimatau
I know this isn't 'exactly' the same but I can't help but find a coloration to
this and Somatosensory Therapy [1].

I've had a traumatic past and I've volunteered at a place that uses Soma.
Essentially it's 'creating new memories through play'. It was used for
abused/molested children.

I hope Kolk can get some finding for clinical research because I do think
there is a possible benefit to role-playing.

Psychology knows that when a child is developing to role-play
verbally/physically specific situations, to train a child. I learned this
through my college course 'Child Psych.'. I was surprised that there is
research on role-playing but...no one in my circle seems to know it's value.

Or in other words, if your child can't be quiet waiting at a doctors office,
while you are at home, you'll 'recreate' the situation and talk out what you
and the child can do in the situation next time. "I'll play with this toy that
I like so much. This will help me pass the time because it's so boring in the
waiting room." Etc.

I know what I'm saying isn't the exact situation but there are parallels to
role-playing with little humans and adult humans. :)

[1] - [https://www.amazon.com/Doodles-Dances-Ditties-Trauma-
informe...](https://www.amazon.com/Doodles-Dances-Ditties-Trauma-informed-
Somatosensory/dp/098927070X/ref=sr_1_1_twi_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1423258834&sr=1-1&keywords=doodles+dances+and+ditties)

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acconrad
> _Psychomotor therapy is neither widely practiced nor supported by clinical
> studies._

Well if this dancer-turned-psychologist is so hellbent on his methods,
shouldn't he subject them to the rigor of clinical research? If I were in his
shoes and I had a method that showed promise, I'd want to evaluate it against
my peers to ensure I have the most eyes available to make it the most
effective - in the same way a crypotographer testing a new algorithm would
open-source his work to find as many exploits as early as possible to
strengthen his work.

I want to believe, because my dad suffers from real bad PTSD from Vietnam, but
it's quotes like these that immediately suck the life out of any hope I had
for ways to help him.

~~~
agronaut
The article goes into that. It's hard to get funding.

~~~
imagist
Is it, though?

Science isn't always an expensive endeavor. Certainly checking in with clients
a few years after and comparing outcomes with a control group could be done
with volunteers. Setting up a blind can be done with basic survey tools which
are available at low cost.

The expensive parts of this research are getting facilities and people willing
to take an untested treatment. But he already has both those, so I really can
only attribute the lack of scientific evaluation to a lack of will to do it.

~~~
tudorw
while you are essentially correct, I would imagine that a therapy such as this
would be hard to 'own' and profit from after successful development, so the
sources of funding may well be quite limited compared to the funding available
to develop a new drug therapy.

~~~
Turing_Machine
There's a much higher bar, too, to any form of research that involves human
subjects. There's a whole regulatory regime that must be complied with to even
get permission to do this kind of research. If the possible downside is high
(as it is here... what if the treatment makes the subjects _worse_ and a bunch
of them wind up more suicidal than they were before?) the level of required
oversight is pretty high.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- unethical and/or misguided researchers
have actively harmed their subjects too many times in the past. Nonetheless,
it's something that people who haven't done human subjects research often
overlook, and something that can add a huge amount of expense and delay.

If you're doing generic CS research* the worst that usually happens is that
you have to reboot. We can't reboot people, at least not yet. :-)

*If you're doing research on, say, human computer interaction, you generally do have to get human subjects approval, but not usually for compilers, algorithms, or the like.

Edit: "people willing to take an untested treatment"

That's exactly the rub. The potential subjects for something like this are
what's known in the jargon as a "vulnerable group". You have to be very, very
sure (and be able to convince a skeptical oversight committee) that your
subjects are, in fact, giving their active and informed consent for an
experimental treatment. That's quite hard to do for people with severe
psychological problems (again, rightly so... some of the abuses of the past
make for sobering reading).

~~~
imagist
But he's already performing the treatment on people. He's already skirting the
regulations. Merely collecting data on what he's already doing doesn't make it
worse.

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dark_star
I'm reading van der Kolk's best-selling book on trauma right now - The Body
Keeps the Score [1]. It's good. My therapist recommended it to me as the best
book on trauma out there right now. Lots of good, current research, his
personal experiences actually healing trauma, and hope that people can get
better. My wife has PTSD (veterinary school and previous relationships) so I'm
trying to understand, and it's helping.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-
Trauma/dp/01...](https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-
Trauma/dp/0143127748)

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itaifrenkel
I've just recently performed in a psychoplayback evening for a small group of
veterans with PTSD for hanuka. "Psychoplayback method uses playback theatre as
the basic method that enables participants to enter a psychotherapeutic
space." We obviously did not recreate scenes nor change them, as that would
have been too close of an expirience. However it did allow to show them others
can get a glimpse of what they are going through, and show other angles such
as their family's. Not being able to understand them was a common theme.
Psychiatrists included

