A radical treatment may help victims of sexual assault recover from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), therapist Amber Crawford said in a presentation Monday, May 22, 2007.

The lecture was sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and Women’s Studies, as well as by the student group Violence Information and Education for Women (VIEW), which won the award for best new student group of the year. About 20 students and faculty attended the event, held in the Greenwalt Student Center Conference Room B, in the lower level of the Creese Student Center at 32nd and Chestnut Streets.

The treatment, called Prolonged Exposure, involves encouraging patients to remember and revisit the traumatic experiences they are typically trying to forget. According to Crawford, it is impossible to move past something if you do not confront it.

“Everyone has a healing time and different coping abilities,” Crawford said. “Everyone deals with the pain. We find the people who develop PTSD are those who try to push away from it.”

Crawford told the audience to think of the mind as a filing cabinet, with various files to store different memories. There is no file for PTSD, she said. It is like papers are thrown all around, and they might pop up anywhere.

“That’s part of the point of Prolonged Exposure,” Crawford said. “To create a place for these feelings and put them there.”

Crawford is a counselor from the organization WOAR – Women Organized Against Rape. WOAR has been using prolonged exposure to help sexual assault victims with PTSD for over five years.

Crawford said each patient begins by creating an In Vivo Hierarchy of how the disorder affects them. This means determining what situations or objects in their everyday lives trigger the emotional, cognitive or physical reactions associated with PTSD. The patient is encouraged to seek out these triggers, working toward the situations that cause the most distress.

“It is physically impossible, if your anxiety level is at a max, and you stay there, [for it to] stay at a max,” Crawford said.

At each session, the patient is asked to relive her traumatic experience, telling her story in the first-person present tense. They tell their story over and over for an hour each week. Crawford said that on each retelling, patients gain some insight into the way they are coping.

For homework, patients are asked to listen to an audio recording of themselves telling their story. After ten weeks of actively confronting their fears and memories in a safe environment, Crawford says 80 percent of patients are no longer controlled by the disorder.

“PTSD makes your life smaller. We want you to be able to open it up and live and go [on].”

Crawford warned that Prolonged Exposure is not appropriate for all victims of sexual assault. Patients must meet several sets of criteria to be diagnosed with PTSD. Even then, depression inventories and other measures are used to assess whether the treatment will be a good fit.

Prolonged Exposure has been used successfully to treat people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, various anxiety disorders, and veterans with PTSD. Dr. Edna Foa at the University of Pennsylvania began applying it to victims of sexual assault 13 years ago. In 2002, her lab partnered with WOAR.

For the past five years Foa’s lab and WOAR have been conducting a study to measure the effectiveness of using Prolonged Exposure to treat children with PTSD. When that study comes to an end this summer, the researchers plan to run a similar study focused on adolescents.