Shifting the focus

Then Girard sought treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder at the Northampton VA Medical Center. Girard hasn’t forgotten the little girl, but he no longer sees her face nor suffers from the memory. He credits the relief to Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR. The therapy typically requires the patient to focus on blinking lights or a practitioner’s finger moving back and forth, usually for a few minutes at a time, while recalling the disturbing memories. In some instances, alternating tones in the ears or electrical pulses in the palms are used instead of visual cues.

Once highly controversial, EMDR has made gains in acceptance. In 2004, both the American Psychiatric Association and the Department of Defense recommended it as an effective treatment for PTSD. In May, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, recognized EMDR as an evidence-based treatment for depression and anxiety as well as for PTSD.

Critics of the treatment still have reservations - even for the treatment of PTSD in combat veterans, the VA ranks EMDR only third as a recommended treatment, behind cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy.

And no one knows exactly how EMDR works. The general theory is that mentally revisiting traumatizing experiences while different parts of the brain are stimulated by the alternating sensations helps the patient overwrite the stored memory with one that has lost its pain and intensity.

Used first in 1987, EMDR has been the subject of dozens of clinical and research studies, including one 1997 randomized clinical trial funded by the managed health care organization Kaiser Permanente, which found that among 67 subjects in an HMO setting, all single-trauma and 77 percent of multiple-trauma patients no longer had PTSD after six 50-minute sessions.