CLINICAL HEURISTICS AND STRATEGIES FOR SERVICE MEMBERS AND VETERANS WITH WAR-RELATED PTSD

We need to engage all well-trained and competent mental health assets, regardless of discipline and guild or degree to help our nation's veterans recover from the war trauma. The goal of this paper was to highlight salient problems and issues in the assessment and treatment of war-related trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and to offer strategies and ways of thinking to redress these issues. The clinical issues and concerns I have addressed are: (a) the need to be clear about what PTSD is and isn't; (b) the need for clinicians to learn about the military culture and ethos; (c) the need to broaden the discourse about what is injurious in war, which includes a review of the existing evidence for psychotherapies for war-related PTSD; and (d) the importance of assessment and outcome monitoring in the treatment of PTSD.