It’s a reality thousands of American Veterans deal with every year: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. 
Now military facilities are working with mental health consultants to offer vets ‘healthy’ ways to cope.

Accelerated Resolution Therapy or ART is a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder treatment that seems to be helping Veterans and trauma victims heal. 

This process differs from most therapies because it does not require patients to talk about their experiences.

Marsha Mandel is a licensed mental health counselor and ART facilitator.
She says the technique focuses on reprogramming a patients’ reaction to bad memories.

Mandel said,

“They visualize their problem and it uses eye movements which accesses a mechanism in their brain…They are able to desensitize the images. And they can actually, believe it or not, they can positivize the images to change how they feel when they recall the facts”

Helping veterans remains a top priority for congress and the president. The proposed 2020 budget includes more than 9 billion dollars for Veterans affairs to improve mental health services and prevent Veteran suicides.

Brian Dempsey with the Wounded Warrior Project says government, businesses, and non-profit organizations must all work together to provide veterans with the services they need.

Dempsey said, “Mental health programming is our biggest program engagement. Last year we spent over 60 million dollars on mental health programming alone.”

The Pentagon is encouraging ART training for many of its mental health providers.

Advocates for ART hope raising awareness about their emerging program will change more Veterans lives for the better.

Providing relief and healing and something we call post-tramautic growth to more people.