Can EMDR Be Delivered to Groups? Lessons From a Refugee Camp

EMDR is one of the best-established treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is usually delivered one to one, with a therapist guiding a single client through their distressing memories over a series of sessions. But individual therapy is time-consuming and resource-heavy, which becomes a serious problem in places where trauma is widespread and trained therapists are scarce, such as in the aftermath of war or disaster. This raises a practical question: could EMDR be delivered to several people at once, without losing its effectiveness? A group version of the therapy, known as the EMDR Group Traumatic Episode Protocol (G-TEP), was designed to do exactly this. Rather than speaking their memories aloud to a therapist, participants work through their own distressing experiences privately, on paper, while a facilitator guides the whole group through the steps together. A randomised controlled trial by Asena Yurtsever and colleagues, published in *Frontiers in Psychology* (2018), tested this protocol in a refugee camp with Syrian refugees living through ongoing crisis. Forty-seven adults with symptoms of post-traumatic stress were randomly assigned either to receive the group EMDR intervention or to a control group. The intervention was remarkably brief: just two group sessions over three days. The results were striking. Before treatment, every participant in the EMDR group met the criteria for a PTSD diagnosis. Afterwards, that figure had fallen sharply, with around six in ten no longer meeting the diagnostic threshold, an improvement that held at the four-week follow-up. Symptoms of depression also decreased. The control group, by contrast, showed little change. The authors are careful not to overstate their findings. The study was relatively small, conducted in extraordinarily difficult conditions, and the brief two-session format may explain why some measures improved more than others. They suggest that future versions might use three or more sessions to strengthen the effect. Even with these caveats, the study makes an important point. It shows that EMDR can be adapted into an efficient group format that works even amid ongoing violence and upheaval, reaching far more people than individual therapy could. For humanitarian settings, and potentially for hard-pressed health services anywhere, that is a genuinely hopeful possibility. *Source: Yurtsever, A., Konuk, E., Akyüz, T., Zat, Z., Tükel, F., Çetinkaya, M., Savran, C., & Shapiro, E. (2018). An Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Group Intervention for Syrian Refugees With Post-traumatic Stress Symptoms: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 493.*