By Mark Curnutte
mcurnutte@enquirer.com
FORT THOMAS - The success of a treatment program at the Veterans Affairs center here for military veterans battling anxiety has made it a national model.
In 2007, not long after a residential program opened for women with post-traumatic stress disorder, program director Kate Chard was called to Washington to meet with then-VA director Jim Nicholson.
He was impressed by the Cincinnati VA's program for troops with post-traumatic stress disorder at its Fort Thomas Center. It boasted a 70 percent success rate with patients suffering from PTSD.
Through most of 2008, Chard, director of the PTSD and Anxiety Disorders Clinic here, traveled the country, teaching therapy methods to other mental health-care professionals.
Chard and her team of therapists use what she calls "cognitive processing therapy," in which patients learn to accept natural emotions such as sadness and grief while recognizing such emotions as guilt are manufactured.
The number of women participating in both the residential, individual and group PTSD program has increased as more women experience violence during their deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
"A person is more likely to have PTSD from an act of interpersonal violence - rape or child abuse - than other types of trauma," Chard said. "By default, as woman experience more combat the rates of PTSD from combat will go up."
The VA anticipates that up to 40 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have experienced or will face PTSD.
The therapy helps patients move past what Chard refers to as "stuck points," emotional and mental places where fictional emotions interfere with fact. For example, many military veterans are crippled emotionally by guilt that they lived when a buddy might have died.
"The goals of the program are to decrease distress and help the veteran create healthier living patterns," Chard said.
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