Clinicians Digest Mar/Apr 2008 - Page 6


Although the IOM stresses that its report isn't saying that other treatments are ineffective—it's merely calling for more research on them—the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has announced that it's ramping up efforts to train its staff in exposure therapy. Larry Scott, founder of VA Watchdog, a veterans' advocacy group, contends that the IOM report furthers the VA's real intention: to curtail spiraling disability benefits by narrowing the diagnosis and treatment of PTSD.

Critics have long claimed that efficiency in the health care system is too often achieved by narrowing the definition of a disorder and limiting treatment objectives, leaving many prospective clients without access to any care and forcing others to settle for abbreviated treatments. Scott fears that the long-term effect of the IOM report will be that veterans are called upon to make yet one more sacrifice—this time, in the name of treatment "efficiency."

Meditating for Clients

In the January/February Psychotherapy Networker, Jerome Front wrote about training therapists to do mindful meditation—not to learn an anxiety-or stress-reducing technique that they can pass on to their clients, but to enhance their own therapeutic insight and skills. A study reported in last October's Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics supports Front's view of the clinical value of meditation for therapists.

Specifically, the study looked at whether psychotherapists in training who worked on an inpatient psychiatric unit would do better therapy if they meditated. The researchers randomly assigned nine of the therapists, who'd had no experience with meditation, to meditate with a Zen master for an hour before their workday during their entire residency. Following each meditation session, the therapists progressed through their rigorous work week of individual and group therapy sessions, social skills trainings, psychoanalysis, and so on.

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