Psychologists Give Some Guidance To Adolescents

Psychologists Give Some Guidance To Adolescents.
Teen girls struggling with post-traumatic anxiety free-for-all stemming from sexual abuse do well when treated with a type of therapy that asks them to time after time confront their traumatic memories, according to a small new study. The study's results suggest that "prolonged disclosing therapy," which is approved for adults, is more effective at helping adolescent girls crush post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than traditional supportive counseling. "Prolonged exposure is a specimen of cognitive behavior therapy in which patients are asked to recount aloud several times their traumatic experience, including details of what happened during the taste and what they thought and felt during the experience," said study initiator Edna Foa, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

And "For example, a friend that felt shame and guilt because she did not prevent her father from sexually abusing her comes to realize that she did not have the drag to prevent her father from abusing her, and it was her father's fault, not hers, that she was abused. During repeated recounting of the harmful events, the patient gets closure on those events and is able to put it aside as something monstrous that happened to her in the past. She can now continue to develop without being hampered by the traumatic experience".

Foa and her colleagues reported their findings in the Dec 25, 2013 consummation of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The researchers focused on a class of 61 girls, all between the ages of 13 and 18 and all suffering from PTSD connected to sexual abuse that had occurred at least three months before the study started. No boys were included in the research.

Roughly half of the girls were given regulatory supportive counseling in weekly sessions conducted over a 14-week period. During that time, counselors aimed to care for a trusting relation in which the teens were allowed to address their traumatic experience only if and when they felt ready to do so. The other firm group was enlisted in a prolonged exposure therapy program in which patients were encouraged to revisit the originator of their demons in a more direct manner, albeit in a controlled environment designed to be both contemplative and sensitive.