As a scientist and clinician, I've long been struck by how trauma, chronic pain, and addiction often travel together. For many patients, these conditions form a tangled knot that is difficult to unravel with traditional therapies. Most psychotherapeutic approaches treat trauma, pain, and addiction in isolation, yet what patients truly need is an integrated approach that addresses them simultaneously. Post- traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD) is highly prevalent among people with chronic pain.
I have worked for 15 years treating veterans in the VA with PTSD. We have effective evidence-based PTSD treatments that significantly reduce symptoms in about 70 percent of the individuals who engage in them. And yet, in meta-analyses comparing military and civilian patients' responses to evidence-based PTSD treatment, civilians had a significantly larger improvement than veterans, especially combat veterans (Straud et al., 2019).
Marina vd Roest hadn't faced the man who abused her in decades when she first sat down in front of the laptop. Confronted with his realistic, blinking, speaking face, she felt "scared ... like a little child again." "Sometimes I had to close the laptop and get my breath back before opening it and continuing with the conversation," she says. Vd Roest is one of the first people to have tried out a radical new form of therapy.
When Rahmanullah Lakanwal came to the U.S. from Afghanistan he appeared lively and full of hope, but over the course of years, he slipped into isolation and was prone to taking cross country drives without telling his family, according to a volunteer who worked closely with his family. Lakanwal, an Afghan national, is accused of shooting two National Guard soldiers on November 26. One of those soldiers, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, died from her wounds.
A woman who claimed she suffered post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of a rear-ending car collision has been awarded €90,000 by the High Court. Katarzyna Sykula, a mother of one who was living in Carlow town at the time of the accident and later in Tullow, Co Carlow, was the subject of what a judge called "a relatively minor rear-ending" by another car near a traffic light in Finglas, Dublin, on December 9, 2017.
When we think of Veterans Day, we often focus on the physical service for our country-the time, the family strain, the stress, the sacrifices. However, much of what veterans deal with occurs when they return home from duty and mental health and substance use issues surface. These are the scars that remain invisible, but ever present. According to the Boulder Crest Foundation, which treats veterans and educates about the topic of post-traumatic growth,
Veterans and loved ones gathered at the Spirit Garden outside Toronto's city hall on Saturday for a ceremony honouring Indigenous veterans. With beaded poppies, music and sacred offerings, about 100 attendees paid homage to the lives lost in service. Indigenous Veterans Day was first commemorated in 1994 and is celebrated across the country on Nov. 8. Rob Baskey, senator for the Metis Nation of Ontario Veterans Council, said Indigenous Veterans Day honours Indigenous members of the military, but also remembers the injustice they faced.
Armenia has seen a lot of violence over the past five years. The small country in the Caucasus, with a population of about 3 million, was defeated in the 2020 war with Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Still, many of the ethnic Armenians who lived in the region stayed. In the years that followed, Armenia saw a series of bloody border clashes with Azerbaijan. Then, in September 2023, Azerbaijan seized full control of Nagorno-Karabakh, leading a mass exodus of more than 100,000 Armenians, who at that point had survived a nine-month blockade and war.
First of all, I'm so sorry that your family and daughter went through something so deeply traumatizing. The thing about experiences that emotionally damage an entire group of people at once is that everyone has to deal with it differently. I understand how reminders of this horrific day cause you tremendous pain. And I see how, for that reason, you'd be squarely against having someone you love tattoo such a reminder on their body where you can never not see it.
Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill to fast-track the study of psychedelic drugs, which a coalition of veterans say hold enormous potential to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. More veterans die from suicide in America on a daily basis than average daily combat deaths in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined, according to data collected by the Department of Veterans Affairs. A growing number of former service members are now turning to psychedelics to treat the mental health conditions caused by wartime trauma and traumatic brain injury.
They're known as 'man's best friend', but dogs may be especially beneficial company for women. A new study reveals how pooches have an extraordinary anti-ageing effect on ladies. According to the authors, spending just one hour per week with a dog slows a key indicator of cellular ageing known as 'telomere length'. For women, dogs may be a cheap and effective form of treatment to help reduce the physical toll of stress and improve cellular health, say the experts.
Northwestern Medicine investigators have uncovered new insights into the synaptic connections of subgroups of interneurons, findings that may improve the understanding of fear responses and could inform new targeted therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a recent study published in Cell Reports. Sachin Patel, MD, PhD, the chair and the Lizzie Gilman Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, was senior author of the study.
In the preamble to the definition of PTSD, we write, these people have been exposed to an extraordinary event that's outside of normal human experience. So it turned out that this is not an unusual experience at all. One of the largest mitigating factors against getting traumatized is who is there for you at that particular time. I did the first study on Prozac for PTSD, the first study for Zoloft for PTSD.
I love exercise. I run every day, regularly work out, and go to spin classes. It's the only way I've found to keep my mental health in check (I've struggled with severe PTSD symptoms from a childhood accident), and it's great for my physical health. I like the way I look and how strong I feel. My fiancé also likes the way I look, but he wants me to spend less time at the gym.
The latest VA/DOD Clinical Practice Guidelines for PTSD were published in 2023; the American Psychological Association Clinical Practice Guidelines for PTSD were published in 2025. In these guidelines, experts rate treatments based on the strength of evidence (strong, weak, or indeterminate) using criteria like study quality, consistency of results, and effect size (how much PTSD symptoms changed from pre to post treatment).
Erica Ortegas has been at the center of one of this season's ongoing storylines, and, frankly, it's been pretty rough on her. It's less that more horrible things have happened to Erica than other members of the Enterprise crew, and more that Erica has been batted around pretty badly by memories of one particular awful experience: her encounter with the Gorn.
A concussion is a form of traumatic brain injury that can occur when a blow to the head or force that shakes your body is strong enough to cause your brain to hit the side of your skull. Myriad symptoms can occur, including headaches, decreases in cognitive function such as confusion or amnesia, sleep difficulties such as prolonged feelings of drowsiness, and emotional dysregulation such as irritability and mood swings.
