The future of EMDR: Therapy on the internet.

Internet in particular, has a significant influence in all domains on our lives. Many rural areas are currently equipped with internet connectivity in which increase the familiarity and comfortability to virtual world. Simultaneously with the advancements in this field, individuals are more conscious and are finding solutions or try to understand their problems through forums or information based websites before seeing a specialist. Furthermore, it seems that the younger generations can build more intimate communication on the internet now and this is growing everyday. Technological innovations have also affected the realm of psychotherapy field. E-therapy is being defined as licensed mental health professionals offering their services through the virtual area such as e-mail, skype or any other video tools and chat technology. However, while the demand of psychologists is quite high, there are not enough qualified mental health providers to provide this service. In addition to that, language barrier is quite a significant problem among Turkish speaking population in Europe and States. It is believed that e-therapy may be an effective tool to access people with disabilities, people living mobile, also to people who doesn’t want to change their therapist due to moving to another city or people who are unable to leave the house as a result of, for instance, agoraphobia or Anxiety Disorder. However, there are also new considerations and issues associated with the medium are uncovered, highlighting some of the currently unresolved ethical concerns regarding online practice. There are different types of interventions in e-therapy however we will be focusing on future of EMDR Therapy in a virtual area. EMDR offers an effective and fast treatment method in face-to-face approach. In this presentation, we aim to highlight the need of future developments of EMDR in different domains. Four subjects will be covered; first, we are going to give a general information about Virtual EMDR, discuss suitability of the patients, and protocols that can be used. Clinical case examples and video clips will be used to illustrate how we use virtual EMDR. Second, we are going to talk about selfadministration of EMDR. Third, we intend to raise a discussion about the opportunities offered by technology while patients and EMDR are in operation, and the possible ethical difficulties that future development can bring. And finally, we will be discussing about the unclosable gap between the demand and supply of mental health services especially in developing countries. The models for mental health provision is adopted in the world from USA and Europe where the population growth is near zero. The entry to the mental health field is deterred by making the entry more and more difficult. This is why it takes couple of thousand hours of supervision to become a Psychologist in the USA. There are 7.6 billion people in the world and very few therapists. We need to train paraprofessionals, teachers, mothers and fathers and managers in the work place “low intensity interventions” developed by brief therapy approaches, and that includes EMDR Therapy. We need to adopt the perspective of preventive medicine.

Conference

English

Inci Tebis Picard
Alişan Burak Yaşar
Şirin Haciömeroğlu
Emre Konuk

Picard, I. T., Yaşar, A. B., Haciömeroğlu, Ş., & Konuk, E. (2018, June). The future of EMDR: Therapy on the internet. In Terrorist attacks, war, disaster. Presentation at the 19th EMDR Europe Conference, Strasbourg, France