This paper is a review of the materials on the topic available online for both the broader audience and the professionals. This review will provide critical analysis of two websites: one of the National Center for PTSD and one of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America; it will also briefly review two recent studies published in credible academic journals.
PTSD is a very widespread disorder with frequent symptoms including anxiety and depression. It can be a debilitating condition depriving a person of the pleasures of social life and reducing its quality in general. For this reason, it is important that all people with this disorder have open and easy access to detailed and up-to-date information about PSTD and its treatment. The textbook provides detailed, in-depth information about PTSD, its symptoms, their assessment and most common ways of treatment. However, it does not mention recent studies regarding the effectiveness of other treatment methods, such as Interpersonal Psychotherapy. For this reason, credible online resources can serve as a great supplement to the textbook, providing knowledge that may not be approved for educational purposes yet.
One of the most important websites dedicated to PTSD is the website of the National Center for PTSD. The website of the center functions as a part of the larger U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs site. Although it is primarily aimed at helping U.S. veterans, it also gives a general overview of PTSD. The home page suggests contacting an online coach specializing in this disorder, visiting a page containing recovery stories of other veterans and answers to the most common questions, as well as a series of cartoons about PTSD and its treatments. These three highly advertised pages are especially useful for the site’s target audience, which is veterans, as they directly offer brief information about the disorder treatment. The site contains three main sections: public, professional and “about us”, since the center’s goals are to provide information to the broader audience and to conduct professional research on PTSD. Each section provides plenty of information important to its target audience: public section gives very detailed information about the disorder and treatment; professional section offers professional consultations, gives scientific overview of the problem and suggests educational courses, as well as a database of research; finally, “about us” tells about the center, its mission and goals. Many of the public section pages, but not all of them, are offered in Spanish, and none of the pages of two other sections has Spanish version, which is a serious weakness because of the inconsistency and lack of enough information for the multitude of Spanish-speaking veterans and family members. Another drawback is the amount of subsections that give links to further subsections, which makes it non-friendly to the user and hard to navigate the site. However, in general, all the information is very useful and provides in-depth insight into the problem.
Another website that contains information on PSTD is the site of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Unlike previous site, this one offers a lot less detailed information on the topic and contains only a very brief overview of PTSD, traumatic events that can lead to it and how to treat it. Since anxiety is a very common symptom of PTSD, the treatment section links to a more general section on treatment of anxiety disorders. The site also offers a brochure and a couple of links to researches and podcast. In general, this website may be useful to people, who have PTSD and experience anxiety because it gives plenty of information on how to cope with the latter. It can also be useful to family members, including to parents of children, who possible have the disorder. However, it is not aimed at professionals, since there are no links or mention of professional research. With all the evident upsides of the site, its main drawback is the scarcity of information on PTSD and no links to the sites of national organizations, where a person could find more information on the disorder. Also, the main page on PTSD does not give link to any facility or a database of professionals, who treat it, which makes it hard for a person to look for cure instead of just information. Such link can only be found on a page titled “After a Trauma”, which is doubtfully the first choice of a user, who looks for a professional therapist.
The first reviewed research is dedicated to the efficiency of the Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for patients with PTSD, who live in unstable environments, such as war conflicts, such as Iraq (Knaevelsrud, Brand, Lange, Ruwaard, & Wagner, 2015). According to the researchers, online CBT is a common and successful practice in the Western society, but it is not widespread on the territories of war conflicts, where it could be needed the most (Knaevelsrud, Brand, Lange, Ruwaard, & Wagner, 2015). The research hypothesized that people with PTSD would benefit from such treatment many times more than people of the control group that would receive no treatment and would be placed on a waiting list. The researchers used randomized controlled trial as the method of the research. The participants were 159 Arabic-speaking adults, 45 of them were male and 114 were female; their age was between 18 and 56; all of them had shown PTSD symptoms of clinical levels evaluated on the basis of DSM-IV; among the participants, 25.8% completed secondary school and 62% graduated from a university (Knaevelsrud, Brand, Lange, Ruwaard, & Wagner, 2015). The traumatic events experienced by the participants were sexual violence, killing of a family member or close person and other violence, including bomb attacks and kidnapping (Knaevelsrud, Brand, Lange, Ruwaard, & Wagner, 2015). The participants were recruited through media in 2009-2011, and the experiment was done in Berlin. The details of the experiment, as well as information about PSTD were provided to them. After completing a computer-based questionnaire, which provided pretreatment results, the participants were randomly assigned to the group receiving treatment and control group. As a result of this treatment, 62% of all patients have recovered from PTSD symptoms, while the rest showed significant reduction in symptoms that lasted for at least 3 months (Knaevelsrud, Brand, Lange, Ruwaard, & Wagner, 2015). Only 1 patient from the control group recovered from the symptoms, thus, showing that online CBT treatment makes recovery chances 74 times higher in the treatment group than in the control group (Knaevelsrud, Brand, Lange, Ruwaard, & Wagner, 2015). These results suggest that online treatment of PTSD is incredibly effective and is a very good treatment opportunity for Middle-Eastern population living in the midst of war conflicts, where almost no offline treatment is offered. The researchers conclude with claiming that online treatment can give access to humanitarian aid and ehealth services (Knaevelsrud, Brand, Lange, Ruwaard, & Wagner, 2015).
The second study researched the difference in effectiveness of Interpersonal Psychotherapy, Prolonged Exposure and Relaxation Therapy. Since the second treatment suffers over 20% of dropouts, possible because of the painful exposure of the patients to the memories of the traumatic events, the researchers hypothesized that Interpersonal Psychotherapy that does not expose patients to traumatic memories would be just as effective as Prolonged Exposure, and both of them would be more effective than Relaxation therapy. They also hypothesized the response and remission rates and improvement in social functioning and quality of life (Markowitz et. al., 2015). Finally, they hypothesized that the number of dropouts would be significantly lower for Interpersonal Psychotherapy than for Prolonged Exposure. In a randomized experiment, 110 18-65-year old patients with chronic PTSD, found through advertisement on the Internet and through hospital flyers, were randomly assigned to three different groups according to three treatments (Markowitz et. al., 2015).The experiment lasted 14 weeks. As a result, 63% of Interpersonal Psychotherapy patients, 47% of Prolonged Exposure patients and 38% of Relaxation Therapy patients showed response to the treatment. At the same time, patients with comorbid major depressive disorder dropped out of Prolonged Exposure group nine times more than other patients (Markowitz et. al., 2015). The researchers concluded that Interpersonal Psychotherapy is a viable alternative to other treatments, while being non-exposure, which provides fewer dropouts. They also claimed that widely applied exposure is not a necessary part of the effective treatment.
This review shows that there is yet not enough online information on PTSD for the broader audience, while the majority of available information is aimed at professionals. There is only one national organization website that promotes itself and can be easily found online by an average user. The remaining websites give only brief overviews that may not be sufficient to a person suffering from PTSD. However, there is plenty of scientific information and researches published for professionals in this field, which makes it easy for them to stay updated on all new findings in the most recent researches. This review shows that it is necessary to provide more information to patients, their family members and other people that do not have professional education in this field, because this information can improve PTSD-patients’ lives by increasing their own awareness about the disorder and the awareness of the society in general. This measure is necessary in order to counterbalance the abundance of professional information that most often cannot be utilized by a non-professional.
References
Knaevelsrud, C., Brand, J., Lange, A., Ruwaard, J., & Wagner, B. (2015). Web-based psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder in war-traumatized Arab patients: randomized controlled trial. J Med Internet Res, 17(3), E71. Retrieved March 03, 2016, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4385175/
Markowitz, J. C., Petkova, E., Neria, Y., Meter, P. E., Zhao, Y., Hembree, E., . . . Marshall, R. D. (2015). Is exposure necessary? A randomized clinical trial of interpersonal psychotherapy for PTSD. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 172(5), 430-440. Retrieved March 03, 2016, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4464805/
PTSD: National Center for PTSD. (n.d.). Retrieved March 03, 2016, from http://www.ptsd.va.gov/
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). (n.d.). Retrieved March 03, 2016, from http://www.adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/posttraumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd
