At one point, simply admitting to battling depression was considered radical. But as the stigma surrounding mental illness continues to fall away, many celebrities are now opening up about the treatment that’s helped them manage their conditions. Recently, the discussion has centered on a lesser-known therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization, and Reprocessing, or EMDR. This week, Paris Jackson mentioned the technique on Red Table Talk, telling Willow Smith she’s used it to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that she developed after years of relentless paparazzi. Earlier this summer, Prince Harry described using the technique to work through his PTSD in the wake of his mother’s death.
In his new documentary The Me You Can’t See, the Royal tells the EMDR therapist that “London is a trigger” and leads to feelings that he’s being “hunted.” The therapist asks him to think of his emotions upon landing there while tapping his shoulders with opposite arms. Jackson did not go into as much detail about her EMDR experience. Still, he said that it’s been helping in treating her “gnarly” social anxiety, as well as the “audio hallucinations” she hears (such as phantom camera clicks) that lead to intense paranoia. “[I’ve] been going to therapy for a lot of things, that included, and I’ve started EMDR,” says Jackson. “I’ll hear a trash bag rustling, flinch, and panic… I think it’s just standard PTSD.” So what exactly is EMDR, and how does it work? Yahoo Life spoke with three experts in the field to help unpack the technique and its potential benefits. Here’s what you need to know.
The technique dates back to the late 1980s
EMDR was the brainchild of the late Dr. Francine Shapiro, a psychiatrist based in California who — while walking in a park one day — realized that her eye movements helped “decrease the negative emotion associated with her distressing memories,” according to the EMDR Institute. Shapiro began testing the technique on volunteers and soon found that engaging the brain in remembering trauma and moving the eyes helped alleviate some pain.
EMDR helps patients undergo a controlled “reprocessing” of a traumatic event
Justin C. Baker, clinical director of the Suicide and Trauma Reduction Initiative for Veterans (STRIVE) and assistant professor-research in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Health at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, says the technique works by “having the patient visualize and retell their story of the event; while the patient visualizes and narrates the event, bilateral eye movement (or some other form of bilateral stimulation like tapping, or playing of audio tones), are facilitated by the therapist.”
Baker says that pairing eye movement and retelling may retrain the brain to store the trauma differently. “The leading hypothesis here is that a dual awareness of the environment helps to facilitate reprocessing the traumatic event similar to possibly how rapid eye movement takes place during REM sleep phases,” Baker tells Yahoo Life. “The goal of treatment within EMDR is to help patients process unprocessed traumatic memories and decrease current symptoms of PTSD.”
Many experts were skeptical of the technique at first, and some remain so
Nancy Smyth, a University at Buffalo School of Social Work professor, has been using EMDR on patients since 1994. Even after receiving training from Shapiro, who invented the technique, she was still dubious about how it worked. “I have to admit, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it initially,” Smyth tells Yahoo Life. “But at that time [Shapiro] sort of challenged us to say, ‘Is it okay for people to change in ways that we don’t always understand?'”
Smyth says the first of her patients who tried it saw immediate results. “She returned a week later, and I said, ‘So, what do you think?’ And she said, ‘Well, it was amazing. All of a sudden, I can now take showers without panic attacks,'” Smyth recalls. “Honestly, I was dumbfounded — and I thought maybe it’s not okay with me if people change in ways I can’t understand. I tell that mostly to explain that I was not a convert; I was skeptical. There has always been a little bit of me every time I use it that is surprised.” Smyth has successfully employed the treatment with trauma patients, including 9/11 survivors, but says that some areas of the scientific community still have to embrace the concept entirely. Due to how quickly it works and how simple it appears, some critics have even called it “pseudoscience.”
