PTSD: National Center for PTSD

Avoidance plays a critical role in PTSD, highlighting the importance of addressing this maintenance mechanism within psychotherapy. Additionally, it may be plausible that problematic avoidance occurs within systems, interpersonal relationships, and therapeutic contexts, as well as at the patient level.

This online course provides an overview of PTSD symptoms, with particular emphasis on the centrality of avoidance behaviors through a Prolonged Exposure (PE) perspective. The author describes how avoidance can manifest in both passive and active forms, using examples, and explores how complicity with avoidance can hinder recovery and perpetuate avoidance patterns.

The VA/DoD Clinical Practice Guideline for PTSD supports good tolerance and efficacy for trauma-focused therapies in those with comorbid history of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Some helpful considerations and modifications may optimize outcomes.

This course reviews research that supports the use of evidence-based trauma-focused therapy for patients with PTSD who have experienced a TBI. The author discusses ways to integrate compensatory cognitive rehabilitation strategies into PTSD treatment. Information about SMART-CPT strategies and other clinical applications are shared.

Written Exposure Therapy (WET) is a manualized trauma-focused evidence-based psychotherapy for PTSD. WET was developed as a brief, more tolerable treatment that is easily trained and disseminated to clinicians who work with PTSD patients. Due to its brevity (5 sessions) and flexibility, it can be used in a variety of clinical settings.

This online course provides information about the development of WET, the evidence showing its effectiveness, and how to implement the treatment in clinical practice.

End-of-life care, often delivered in palliative or hospice settings, helps patients have a death that involves minimal pain and suffering as well as optimal emotional well-being and quality of life. For patients with pre-existing PTSD, chronic symptoms, or a flare of symptoms during EOL can complicate the dying process for patients and their loved ones.

This online course for interprofessional health care teams will help clinicians working with patients at EOL to think through how PTSD may present at end of life, and how they may assess for and help patients address PTSD in this unique context.

Accurate and comprehensive assessment of PTSD is essential to understand a patient's clinical presentation and to support evidence-based treatment. Information in this course stems from VA's PTSD Consultation Program requests.

This online course reviews frequently asked questions related to PTSD assessment and diagnosis. Topics include Criterion A trauma, PTSD symptoms, measurement tools, providing empathic feedback on assessments, and common patient presentations. Research, literature, and resources associated with PTSD assessment are reviewed.