Main description:

Rauch and McLean bridge the gap between neuroscience research and the treatment of PTSD patients.

Individuals with PTSD have developed automatic associations between specific stimuli and traumatic events. As a result, these individuals experience intense fear when exposed to the stimuli, even though the original threat is no longer present.

This book presents prolonged exposure therapy (PE), a specific manualized exposure therapy program for PTSD. A variant of exposure therapy, PE is a cognitive behavioral approach designed to reduce pathological anxiety and related emotions by helping patients approach relatively safe but distress-provoking thoughts, memories, situations, and stimuli, with the goal of reducing unhelpful emotional reactions to those stimuli.

Informed by extensive research but written for clinicians, the book explains how neuroscience can guide our application of the three key components of PE: (1) psychoeducation about the nature of trauma, (2) in vivo exposure to trauma reminders, and (3) imaginal exposure to the memory of the traumatic event followed by processing of the imaginal and other exposures.

Contents:

Preface
I. Overview of Prolonged Exposure and Theory
Chapter 1. Theory and Prolonged Exposure
Chapter 2. What Is Prolonged Exposure Therapy?
II. Neuroscience Methods for Clinicians
Chapter 3. Neurosteroids, Cortisol, and Other Neurochemicals
Chapter 4. Imaging
Chapter 5. Electroencephalography
Chapter 6. Psychophysiology
Chapter 7. Genetics and Genomics
III. Applied Neuroscience: Prolonged Exposure for PTSD
Chapter 8. Psychoeducation and Neuroscience
Chapter 9. In Vivo Exposure and Neuroscience
Chapter 10. Imaginal Exposure and Neuroscience
Chapter 11. Processing and Neuroscience
IV. Future Directions
Chapter 12. Augmentation of Prolonged Exposure
Chapter 13. New Models of Care Delivery
References
Glossary