A surprising approach to trauma

Professionals in business continuity and crisis management have learned that following major incidents, people may be emotionally very disturbed by events and require further consideration and support.  The business continuity plans for HR departments often refer to the ability to call upon a professional trauma counselling service to support staff in such circumstances.

Whilst there is clearly a place for professional counselling on occasion, it is my experience that people want to share their experience with others who had the same experience.  Consequently, following bombings in the UK, staff often reported that talking about their experience and sharing their feelings with those who had been there too was the most beneficial activity for them.  By admitting to feelings of fear, guilt at survival and the persistent questioning of "what if" - where different variations of what might have happened if they had made some slight change to their actual actions constantly play in their mind.  These can be completely debilitating and sharing these concerns with those with similar experiences usually proves very beneficial - and of course some professional facilitation of such an approach can be very useful indeed.

However, recently I became aware of a completely different approach to post-trauma work being pioneered amongst troops returning home from active duties. Both of which involve video games.  In one experimental approach, troops are able to re-enact the events of an actual engagement as video game and then to discuss the feelings that they had.  By repeating the game and exploring their feelings they are able to resolve the uncertainties that persist in the mind and recover to normal life.

Even more surprising is recent work looking at the resolution of issues with flashbacks - a phenomenon where the soldiers find themselves literally re-experiencing combat operations when they might be reading a book, travelling on the tube or otherwise living normal life.  These vary from bad dreams to completely encompassing experiences that prevent normal functioning of daily life.  Once again, video games are being used to see how it is that the brain can be helped to recover and the amazing answer is "Play Tetris".  It seems that playing a visual game like Tetris occupies the parts of the brain that are generating the disturbing images of war and gradually provide something different for the brain to concentrate on.  Clinical trials have found that participants found considerable reductions in their experience of flashbacks within a week of playing Tetris on a regular basis.

Whilst we are far from having a clinical therapy that is based only on computer games, and nor would I suggest that you cancel the professional trauma services and replace these with a set of game boys, it is certainly an interesting development and I am sure we shall see more development in this field in the near future.