The statistics are staggering when it comes to our nation’s heroes and instances of PTSD.
Whether they’re from a military background, they’re law enforcement officers or first responders, it’s clear the traumatic events they may witness at any given time during their service can have devastating effects on them.
Organizations around the country have compiled the numbers that indicate:
- -Veterans are at 72% higher risk of suicide than those who haven’t served.
- Up to 29% of veterans have PTSD at some point in their lives.
- An average of 17 veterans died by suicide every day in 2021.
- A survey of EMTs and paramedics in the U.S. Found that 37% had contemplated suicide and 6.6% had attempted it. That’s 10 times the rate of the general population.
- More than 50% of law enforcement officers experience psychological trauma from a highly stressful event.
- A recent study concluded that law enforcement officers have a 54% increase in suicide risk compared to civilians.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a disorder that develops in some people who have experienced a shocking, scary or dangerous event. Some symptoms of PTSD can include vivid flashbacks, intrusive thoughts or images, nightmares, intense distress at real or symbolic reminders of the trauma and physical sensations like pain, sweating, nausea or trembling. The effects can be so debilitating that some have a hard time maintaining a regular life and in some cases, if left untreated, can even end in suicide.
‘A complex disorder’
It’s a problem that has no quick and easy fix. But at the University of Central Florida, they’re working on some solutions.
They have a clinical research center called UCF Restores, which is dedicated to changing how PTSD is understood, evaluated and treated. They have a clinic that provides behavioral treatment to anyone in the state of Florida who has suffered from a traumatic event, free of charge.
We’re going to show you how UCF Restores is using virtual reality to help relieve with PTSD and trauma. You’ll see what researchers are learning from it, how some are getting and seeing results-- and why there are some limits on how it can help.
Dr. Deborah Beidel is the executive director of UCF Restores and said PTSD can really cripple a person and limit their everyday life.
“People are very anxious about it, they can’t stop thinking about it, they have difficulty sleeping, they have difficulty eating, they may have nightmares, they may have startle reactions. We talk about how on the Fourth of July, fireworks will really agitate veterans because it sounds very much like the gunshots of war,” Beidel said. “So it’s a complex disorder that is mostly anxiety-based, but people can also have a significant amount of depression involved.”
PTSD may happen in a short amount of time after the traumatic event, or in some cases, symptoms can take years to surface if something triggers the person.
“In many cases, if people don’t have a strong response at the beginning, later on something may trigger that,” Beidel said. “So they might see something that really, really reminds them of that night where other things didn’t. I know, we had one first responder who said that he saw someone wearing a shirt, and all he could think of was, ‘Oh my God, that’s the shirt that was on that person who was deceased that night.’ So that’s the kind of thing that can happen. So for him, it wasn’t just a generic sound or smell. But it was a specific item of clothing that brought back those feelings.”
Traditional treatments to help with PTSD typically range from therapy, behavior therapy, group therapy, and medications, to even exposure therapy.
“Exposure therapy to say it very simply, is, if I asked you, ‘How do you get over your fear of a dog?’, you would say, ‘Well, I have to be around a dog, right?’” Beidel said.
And in recent years, they’ve started doing exposure therapy for traumatic events using virtual reality to recreate situations you wouldn’t want to recreate in real life. Part of the reason they use virtual reality is because with traditional exposure therapy, clinicians would have to tell the patient to imagine the scene in which the trauma happened. But it wasn’t always successful because the clinician can’t control what you’re thinking about, and if you were too afraid to revisit the memory, it may not work.
So VR allows them to immerse you in the environment, but the original products out there were missing something.
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“The original virtual reality packages that were available were good, but they were limited because they only had a certain number of scenes. The clinician did not really have the ability to create a scene, you had to go to the 12 or 20 scenes that they had and see if there was something there. And most of them were originally for the military,” Beidel said. “VR is the step that allows me to present and control the sights, the sounds and the smells of your particular trauma. And it has to be individualized because you and I might be at the same event, but we’ve got our own perspectives, just like right now you’re looking at one thing, I’m looking at the other thing. So I have to be able to create what you saw, what you heard and what you smelled, and the systems that we had didn’t allow us to do that.”
Enter ReArmor, a VR system that’s still in trials at UCF Restores that is changing the exposure therapy game, created by the team at Terasynth.
“This has never been done before. They’re developing a system that someone with no computer programming skills, such as most of our clinicians, is able to put together a scene,” Beidel said. “You can put in longitude and latitude someplace in Alaska, and suddenly Alaska will be on your screen. And then from there, you can build the traumatic event that happened to that particular person. It could be a sight, it could be a sound, it could even be a smell. A number of people from the Pulse nightclub shooting, as we treated some survivors as well as first responders, talked about the smell of alcohol, and particularly the smell of tequila because it was Latin night. And now they say, ‘I can’t go by a bar. Because if I smell alcohol, I have this instant reaction that I’m back in Pulse and I have to leave.’ So it can be any type of signal. It’s just something that’s associated with that event.”
‘I can still see the faces’
In Orlando, one of the biggest tragedies, and one of the most traumatic events our first responders have experienced, the Pulse nightclub shooting on June 12, 2016. 49 innocent clubgoers lost their lives that night when a gunman started shooting inside Pulse keeping dozens hostage for hours.
For the law enforcement officers and first responders who showed up to help, their lives have never been the same.
“I can still see the faces, I can still smell the building, I can still see all the blood,” then-Orlando Police Officer Gerry Realin said.
“I had no idea she was dead until I pulled her up and I saw her face,” Orlando Police Officer Rick Fink said. “All those things just kept replaying in my mind, in my mind, in my mind.”
News 6′s Trooper Steven Montiero was also at Pulse that night. At the time, he was a full-time Florida Highway Patrol Trooper and answered the call. He can relate to the sentiments of the other officers who responded, so he got the chance to get a very real look at how ReArmor works, from a perspective other reporters may not quite understand.
If you watch the video attached to this article, please be aware it could be triggering if you have any connection to the Pulse event or other mass shootings.
Ali Mahvan, CEO and founder of Terasynth, helped guide Montiero through the scenario.
As soon as the scene was loaded, Montiero said he was immediately brought back to that night.
“This is weird, especially knowing the layout of the building, to physically be here is a little odd,” Montiero said.
“In a future update, we’ll actually be able to see your hands and where you’re looking and it records that information so we’re able to take your physiological signs as well as take the recorded objects and the directions that you’re looking and then map all that information for a clinician to analyze,” Mahvan said.
“So if I wanted to physically walk in here right now, I could?” asked Montiero, from the patio of Pulse, preparing to walk inside the building.
“Yes,” Mahvan said.
“And the scene is basically recreated from documents and crime scene photos from the actual scene?” Montiero asked.
“Yes, it is,” Mahvan said.
“I catch myself being hesitant,” Montiero said. “I keep thinking that the scene’s hot even though I know it’s not and I hesitated moving around freely.”
“What emotions do you feel when you walk inside the scene?” Mahvan asked.
“I honestly, I got a little foggy. Because I know I’m here to do an interview with you guys, but,” said Montiero, pausing. “I get a little pissed off being here just because there’s nothing you can do. And I think that’s the weird part about it. There was really nothing any of us could do.”
“So the idea of this product is that trained clinicians essentially work with their patients and understand what their triggers are. And then work with them to isolate those triggers and focus on treating those triggers,” Mahvan said. “So let’s just say, in the actual event, the table that he’s adjusting right now, maybe was flipped over. And if the patient’s traumatic experience, if their trigger is related to let’s say, a bottle that had fallen off of that table, the clinician could actually knock that table over and drop that bottle on the floor. And that is where the hyper-focus of the treatment occurs. So it’s the clinician working directly with their patient.”
“And this could be matched with audio as well,” Montiero said.
“Yeah, there actually, there are audio triggers. Essentially, every object has a context menu so you can activate lights and sirens, for example,” Mahvan said.
‘I think this is going to help a lot of people’
After trying out the product, Montiero took a moment to reflect on his experience and how it made him feel.
“This allowed me to go right back to Pulse. A lot of us were there that night. And to use the term foggy maybe is how I kind of felt when I first got there. My hands immediately started sweating. I was hesitant to go into the room. I know it’s VR, but they were able to rebuild that building exactly,” Montiero said. “And I will say I think, even as I knew it’s VR walking in there, the cutting the pie. For those that don’t speak cop terms, like I was afraid to enter the room right off the bat, I could see what was going on. I caught myself lifting my hand by my waistline where my service pistol would be at, kind of thing. So it was interesting because your brain starts to do something even though I know I’m here just conducting an interview. I think this is going to help a lot of people.”
“What he was experiencing and describing is what most people have when they go through the treatment,” Beidel said. “Everybody thinks that they’re going to lose control. You know, we’ve had military sometimes say to us, ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ And we’re like, “Well, no, you’re not going to hurt us.’ The reaction is not as severe as most people think it will be it is, if we do this right. And it’s up to us as therapists to make sure we have the right cues, people’s heart rate will increase, they may sweat, they may breathe faster, they may feel dizzy. But we don’t let people go until their anxiety has come back down. So that’s why training in cognitive behavioral therapy, knowing how to do exposure sessions is important. This is not VR therapy. This is exposure therapy that uses virtual reality to make it more powerful. We’ve done over 1,400 people now. And no one has completed suicide or even attempted suicide as a result of this program.”
Beidel said that ReArmor can be used on anyone with any type of trauma including victims of mass shootings, survivors of sexual assault, anything like that. And it’s important to remember, there really isn’t a cure for PTSD, but a tool like ReArmor can get you back to living your life again.
“It’s hard to say that it can be cured, because the things that people see in these kinds of traumatic events, I don’t think you can ever unsee them. And so I think the idea of the successful therapies is that people learn to put that particular memory in its place,” Beidel said. “We want people to understand we’re retraining the brain, we’re teaching the brain that once in your bedroom or in a nightclub, something awful happened. But not every time that you’re in your bedroom, are you going to be sexually assaulted, not every time you go into a club that looks like Pulse is a gunman going to come in and kill 49 people. And that’s the key, it’s retraining your brain, we know the brain is making new connections, and it’s saying, ‘Okay, every time I go past the bar, shooting is not going to break out’ and you don’t go out of your way to avoid that iPhone ring, because that’s all you heard that night down in the club. So it’s putting it in its place, it’s understanding that there might always be a little reminder. But that little reminder doesn’t send you running in the other direction.”
Another benefit of the ReArmor system is that because it’s cloud-based, it can be done remotely if need be. For a lot of veterans, law enforcement officers and first responders, there’s a huge stigma surrounding mental health. It’s seen as a weakness for many to go for treatment, and many refuse treatment at clinics because they don’t want anyone to know they need to be treated.
“Stigma is a big issue. And it’s particularly an issue in those two groups, because those two groups have a servant’s heart, as I say, that they want to help others. That’s their job, right? So they save us in times of war. They save us in times of peace. It’s really difficult to turn around and then say, ‘Hey, I need help,’” Beidel said. “I think it will really open it up to people who have a need and desire to get the treatment, but yet may not be able to physically get to a treatment center.”
So the big question is, how successful is ReArmor and can it get results on a larger scale, around the country?
“When we had a system that just had military scenes in it, 66% of veterans who had PTSD no longer met criteria after 15 days of treatment,” Beidel said. “That’s two to three times most other treatment outcomes for military PTSD. Our first study with first responders using the first iteration of the system we have now, we had a small sample because it was a testing sample, but 14 out of 14, so 100%, no longer had PTSD at the end of 14 days of treatment. That’s a terrific number. I don’t know if the efficacy will get any better. Because I think we’re all individuals. And so there’s always going to be something about some people that is just not going to work. Tylenol works well for some people, other people need Motrin, right. It’s just the way it is. So I don’t know that we’ll be able to improve the efficacy much over about 80%. But we will be able to get this treatment out to many, many more people.”
Beidel says they hope to have all the bugs worked out of the ReArmor system and have it available for wide release as soon as fall 2024.
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