The method sounds bizarre: Rapid movements of the eye, prompted by a therapist, unlock and chase away mental ghosts that have tormented victims for decades.
The jury is still out on Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, or EMDR, a controversial new therapy for such mental illnesses as depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
But presentations at the recent American Psychiatric Association convention show that what began as a fringe therapy is being taken seriously by mainstream psychiatrists.
“In the 10 years I have been working with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I have not seen this level of excitement,” said Dr. Steven Southwick, a Yale University psychiatrist who heard the new research presented at the conference in Miami Beach.
“I’m not sure how it works, and I’m not sure anyone knows. But I’ve been very impressed by the number of clinical reports on this treatment. You cannot ignore it.”
Sitting in front of a therapist, a patient is asked to recall the most extreme feelings and images that cause the distress-seeing buddies killed in Vietnam, the moment of rape or the phobia that paralyzes them. While concentrating on those feelings, the person watches the therapist’s finger move back and forth.
Simultaneous eye motion while dwelling on the troubling thought is believed to trigger a brain activity that helps the person process-and be relieved of-the troubling thought.
Some patients report a feeling of calm immediately afterward. Troubling images reportedly go away in just a few sessions.
Ruth Grainger, a nurse practitioner and a psychotherapist in South Florida for 20 years, says response has been “pretty spectacular” in about half of the 500 clients with whom she has used EMDR since 1991 and to a lesser degree with nearly all of the other half.
“It still blows me out of the water, it’s such a powerful tool,” she says.
Richard Torrens, 49, of Miami, has lived with depression, alcoholism and a litany of post-traumatic stress symptoms since his Vietnam days in 1967-68.
The experience-extensive combat, constant vigilance-left him feeling “unhooked” years afterward. Eventually talk therapy helped some, and so did medication. But nothing helped as much as five sessions of EMDR early this year, he says.
“It definitely works-why, I don’t know,” he says. “It doesn’t sound too scientific. But it just hooks something back up that had been destroyed.”
Whatever was destroyed made it hard for him to enjoy everyday pleasures. If things went well, he felt undeserving. EMDR seemed to lift that depression. “I can play with my kids, I can love my wife,” he says.
Although the main focus of EMDR has been post-traumatic stress, particularly for combat veterans and victims of violence, Grainger has used it for an array of anxieties, including a woman who had been afraid to leave her house and another who was rid of an overwhelming fear of snakes.
EMDR was developed in 1987 by California psychologist Francine Shapiro. Walking in a park one day she noticed that her eyes moved during a disturbing thought. Afterward, the thought did not bother her anymore. She set out to look for a connection. She refined her method, and when her first study of EMDR for post-traumatic stress was published in 1989, other mental health professionals became interested.
Maybe, Shapiro hypothesizes, some thoughts and experiences are so traumatic that our minds cannot process them. The images become frozen and are seen repeatedly, as in the nightmares of someone who nightly re-lives a Vietnam firefight, or an assault or Hurricane Andrew.
Her method, perhaps, triggers a natural process that turns a paralyzing thought or event into just a memory. Already, Shapiro and those trained by her have taught about 10,000 people to do the therapy. But it is not without controversy.
Plenty of people still think it’s bunk: It seems too easy, and there is no scientific explanation for what happens in the brain to make it work.
But the fact that the work of four researchers was accepted for presentation at the American Psychiatric Association, considered a traditional group along the spectrum of mental health care, suggests growing respectability.
Some leaders in the use of EMDR are volunteering in Oklahoma City, working with people traumatized by the explosion there April 19 and training mental health workers.
Even advocates, however, warn that this method is not for amateurs and should be used only in conjunction with other therapy. Shapiro and others do not allow the therapist’s motions to be videotaped. Training is done through seminars around the country.
