Background
Trauma-focused therapies (TFTs) are first-line treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, TFTs are under-utilised, partly due to clinicians’ and patients' fear that TFT is too challenging or harmful. We review the qualitative studies on how adults with PTSD experience TFTs to enhance the understanding of user perspectives, therapeutic processes, and outcomes.

Introduction Treatments such as eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing and (narrative) exposure therapies are commonly used in psychological trauma. In everyday practice, art therapy is also often used, although rigorous research on its efficacy is lacking. Patients seem to benefit from the indirect, non-verbal experiential approach of art therapy. This protocol paper describes a study to examine the effectiveness of a 10-week individual trauma-focused art therapy (TFAT) intervention.

We studied the mechanisms of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and imagery rescripting (ImRs). We hypothesized that EMDR works via changes in memory vividness, that ImRs works via changes in encapsulated beliefs (EB), and that both treatments work via changes in memory distress. Patients (N = 155) with childhood-related posttraumatic stress disorder (Ch-PTSD) received 12 sessions of EMDR or ImRs. The vividness, distress, and EB related to the index trauma were measured with the Imagery Interview.

Background: Stressful events increase the risk for treatment-resistant depression (TRD), and trauma-focused psychotherapy can be useful for TRD patients exposed to early life stress (ELS). Epigenetic processes are known to be related to depression and ELS, but there is no evidence of the effects of trauma-focused psychotherapy on methylation alterations.

Objective: We performed the first epigenome-wide association study to investigate methylation changes related to trauma-focused psychotherapies effects in TRD patients.