Frontiers of trauma treatment

On September 26th 2009 Typhoon Ketsana wrought devastation on parts of the Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia. Mindful of the hard lessons learned running a tsunami trauma programme in Thailand in 2005/06 Jane Lopacka, an EMDR therapist and training facilitator and director of Phnom Penh Counselling Centre, led and supervised a team of Cambodian MA in Clinical Psychology students who were trained in Part 1 EMDR to provide EMDR treatment to Ketsana victims. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the scope, assessment methods, treatment programme, constraints, financial issues, and challenges of the programme whilst utilising the lessons learned from Thailand’s Tsunami EMDR trauma programme. The results regarding the efficacy of EMDR in a Cambodian context will be examined using pre and post treatment data. The results include a comparison of 4 months post-treatment evaluation compared to an assessment of an equivalent random number of Ketsana victims from the same and neighbouring villages who did not receive treatment (to be completed in June 2010 as the farming season dictates). This paper will also demonstrate the utilisation of the lessons learned from Thailand’s Tsunami EMDR programme in a typhoon trauma treatment programme in Cambodia. Also, this being the students’ first exposure to trauma work using EMDR, this paper will record the experiences of the students involved. By way of conclusion this paper will identify further lessons learned in Cambodia along with recommendations regarding future feasible and manageable post-trauma work with limited resources and a small budget in a Southeast context.

Conference

English

Bessel A. van der Kolk

van der Kolk, B. A. (2010, July). Frontiers of trauma treatment. Presentation at the 1st EMDR Asia Conference, Bali, Indonesia