Prolonged Exposure Therapy Prolonged exposure therapy involves a process of repeatedly recounting the event as well as facing the source of trauma, as well as real world triggers ("Prolonged Exposure Therapy"). Prolonged exposure therapy, similar to cognitive processing therapy, has four main components: education, breathing, exposure, and recounting the trauma. Chronologically, the first component of prolonged exposure therapy is education. Patients talk through the process with professionals, discuss the positives and negatives, goals of treatment, and learn more about symptoms. This first step provides the stepping stone for later sessions ("Prolonged Exposure Therapy"). Another aspect of prolonged exposure therapy is breathing; patients …show more content…
Prolonged exposure therapy and cognitive processing therapy when compared to non-trauma psychotherapies showed similar symptom improvement, especially when compared after follow-up sessions. The current policy of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD recommends cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy as first-line treatment. Though still inconclusive, some studies show that treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder show more positive outcomes for civilians than veterans. Speculation on this disparity suggests that this may be due to “extended, repeated, and intense nature of deployment trauma and the fact that service members are exposed not only to life threats but to traumatic losses and morally compromising experiences that may require different treatment approaches,” and recent meta-analyses that compared both civilian and military personnel responses to trauma focused and non-trauma focused psychotherapies found that patients with “complex trauma” (i.e. veterans and refugees) showed a smaller difference in effectiveness between trauma focused and non-trauma-focused psychotherapies than civilians, whose results favored trauma focused …show more content…
This is partially due to posttraumatic stress disorder as a more recent addition to the DSM, having been added in 1978 to the third edition, though research on PTSD treatments is optimistic. For example, a study involving 37 female rape survivors conducted to find the effects of cognitive processing therapy on PTSD related cognitions and other symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder partially supported symptom reduction among participants for this therapy. This research can and will be built upon by randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses, and future