Changing lives
Evidence-based therapies aid vets
The scars of war are often deep, varied and unseen. Just as with any war wound, mental health treatments must be effective and long-lasting. The Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System is committed to providing the best possible care for our heroes, and ensuring that veterans have access to the most effective treatments available.
One of the ways we are impacting the lives of our veterans is using evidence-based psychotherapies (EBP) to treat the unseen scars of war. EBP refers to therapies that have been researched and proven effective in reducing the debilitating effects of specific mental health conditions. The VA has spent more than 10 years ensuring that EBPs are available and accessible to veterans.
Simply put: Evidence-based psychotherapies are treatments that work. They have a research base that demonstrates that they are effective and the data show that EBPs reduce symptoms, improve quality of life and promote recovery.
Veterans who engage in and complete EBPs can live their lives more fully. One of the typical ways veterans may respond to symptoms of PTSD is to practice avoidance of anything that triggers their trauma reaction. While this can be a short-term “fix,” the long-term result leaves the veteran living in a world that just keeps getting smaller and smaller because those trauma reactions get triggered by more and more things.
We’ve seen successful treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder through EBP practices. The evidence-based psychotherapies the VA provides are cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure therapy, and both treatments have been proven to work by reducing reactivity to trauma memories and developing skills to respond differently to those memories. This enables veterans to live the lives they want to be living. These proven therapies are also associated with decreased risk for suicide.
CAVHS offers 17 different EBPs treating conditions such as depression, PTSD, substance use disorder, chronic pain, insomnia, and severe mental illness with more than 70 EBP-trained providers—more than half of those professionals trained to treat PTSD. CAVHS provides veterans access to these therapies in multiple clinical areas, including our community-based outpatient clinics as well as EBP via our telehealth initiatives. These therapies are offered as sole therapy, or in combination with pharmacotherapy.
The VA is heavily invested in providing our veterans these modern mental health services because our heroes deserve the best care. As the needs and demographics of our veteran population change, CAVHS will continue to lead the way in innovative treatments of the mental health needs of our veterans so they can truly live their best lives.