Treating Traumatic Stress Injuries in Military Personnel ─ An EMDR Practitioner's Guide

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a physical therapy involving attention, memory, and movement, practiced by some mental health professionals. It is designed to reduce symptoms related to emotional trauma. This book is a practical training guide for EMDR practitioners working with military clients. The book's authors are PhD mental health professionals with clinical experience, who are also military veterans: Mark C. Russell (psychology, Antioch U Seattle) is a retired US Navy commander and board-certified clinical psychologist with 26 years of military experience, and Charles R. Figley is the Paul Henry Kurzweg Distinguished Chair in Disaster Mental Health at Tulane U and a Vietnam veteran (Sgt, US Marines). Since they come from military culture and mental health services, they are well-suited to help civilian mental health professionals understand how to offer therapy with dignity to military personnel. The authors argue that modern warfare is increasingly designed to inflict social, emotional, and neurological as well as body damage, and it is natural that modern soldiers will show the kinds of afflictions seen in recent data: high rates of difficult-to-diagnose chronic problems that appear to be both "physical" and "psychological." The authors simply define this kind of problem as traumatic stress injury, and look at how to use EMDR to treat it. The book is divided into four sections: EMDR treatment of military populations, the EMDR protocol for military populations, EMDR treatment for chronic war/traumatic stress injuries (medically unexplained symptoms, traumatic grief, interpersonal violence, and others), and special considerations (ethical and medico-legal issues, enhancing resilience, self-care for practitioners). There are three appendices: military mental health referral resources, an EMDR troubleshooting guide, and references. The book is well-organized and written in a straightforward, compressed, practical style. It is designed for clinical practice with both current and former military personnel. This is an EMDR clinical guide, not a sales tool for EMDR; it is clear about recommending other kinds of action or treatment when appropriate, and recommending against EMDR in certain situations. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Mark C. Russell, PhD, is a retired U.S. Navy commander and board-certified clinical psychologist with 26 years of military experience. He is the author of multiple publications on war stress injuries and recipient of the 2006 Distinguished Psychologist Award by Washington State Psychological Association. Currently, he serves as chair of the PsyD program and founding director of the Institute of War Stress Injuries and Social Justice at Antioch University in Seattle.

Charles R. Figley, PhD, is the Paul Henry Kurzweg Distinguished Chair in Disaster Mental Health at Tulane University. A former Marine sergeant who served early in the Vietnam War, he went on to help pioneer the modern study and treatment of trauma and many innovations in helping the traumatized, including practitioners themselves, in his more than 200 scholarly articles, chapters, and books.