Mumbai, June 14, 2019: A group of mental health professionals from Mumbai spent a week in Colombo early June to train 45 priests, nuns and doctors in the art of reprocessing painful memories.
The memories pertain to Easter Sunday on April 21, when suicide bombers targeted three churches and three hotels that killed more than 250 Sri Lankans and foreign tourists.
Parul Tank, psychiatrist and member of the Mumbai team the training that began on June 3 focused on EMDR or eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, a therapy that allows people to change their maladaptive or bad memories to more adaptive ones.
“This helps reduce trauma and prevent future triggers,” said Tank, a member of the EMDR Association of India, which has been popularizing the technique since the Bhuj earthquake in 2001.
While the EMDR Association of India has been travelling to Sri Lanka on a shoestring budget since 2012 to train people on EMDR, this year was different in that the Lankan association had made a special request for special modules that could help in group therapies.
“A village lost many people in the attacks, resulting in thousands of families joined in grief and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. As EDMR concentrates on group healing, we focused on how to help people heal collectively,” said psychologist Sushma Mehrotra, founder president of EMDR Association of India.
EMDR, a relatively new branch of psychotherapy developed in the late 1980s, focuses on traumatic memories and other adverse life experience and helps people develop coping techniques.
The technique derived its name from the fact that therapists use eye movements, hand-tapping or audio stimulations to develop coping skills among survivors.
“It is one of the first-line treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. It helps people move from bad memories to adaptive ones. It is efficient, short-term therapy that can be done individually or in groups,” said Dr Tank, adding that studies have proven its effectiveness.
EMDR India came about when academicians led by Dr Mehrotra in the early nineties reached out to the US-based Trauma Recovery-Humanitarian Assistance Programme.
“Our first project was the Bhuj earthquake in 2001… we carried out our interventions for months thereafter,” she said.
India’s EMDR Association was formally set up in 2013 and has intervened during the Kashmir floods in 2014, the Nepal earthquake in 2015 and the Kerala landslides in 2018.
The city teams first trains trainers, who then travel to the affected areas and carry out long-term counselling for survivors. “In Kerala, we met people who were petrified of snakes as the reptiles were crawling up their houses for shelter during the rains,” said the doctors, adding that their work with the Kerala victims still continues over Skype calls.
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com