Life after PTSD

How do people with PTSD come back to normal?

Exposure therapy often helps the person with PTSD revisit or re-experience their trauma as a means of lessening the effect the memory has on them, said Dr. Albert “Skip” Rizzo, a psychiatrist who works with the military and has pioneered use of virtual reality for treating PTSD.

This kind of therapy has been around for years. Typically a therapist would ask someone to imagine they are experiencing their trauma again. This would happen repeatedly, and ideally, with each retelling of what happened, the event would seem gradually less threatening.

Rizzo, who is with the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, and other experts have employed virtual reality for this purpose. Patients wear goggles and describe their experiences while a technician stands by with a console changing the scene to fit the patient’s description.

If the patient recalls hearing a young boy’s voice, for instance, the technician makes that happen. If the patient experienced the trauma at night or in the daytime, or perhaps was involved in an IED explosion, those circumstances will be created in the virtual world.

“We can begin to pace the exposure in a very evocative fashion,” Rizzo said.

“This works because some people don’t engage in the trauma memory at a sufficient level. They don’t engage fully with their imagination to confront difficult memories.”

A therapy that uses similar principles is called cognitive processing therapy. It helps patients become aware of their thoughts and feelings and learn how to deal with changes in beliefs from before and after trauma.

Some patients also benefit from medication.