Good point. Citation pl0z? Also i have done EMDR…just the once. It interests me that it’s still used if it’s such a pseudoscience….god damn we all have to do our own research, I find it hard enough to trust people and when someone in tht position (mental health doc) is using something like EMDR then it makes me even more loath to trust the medical community D:Can someone cite some reputable source/s for this? Because there is noactual correlationbetween eye movement and lying, so I would take this with a rather large grain of salt. It sort of puts me in the mind of EMDR, which is an utter pseudoscience…
I don’t know anything about this image, but I have PTSD and EMDR helped me tremendously. The article the person calling it a pseudoscience linked to doesn’t debunk EMDR and say it’s crap; it actually says that there are a bunch of studies out there, some empirical, that support it’s effectiveness, and that the APA recognizes it as a type of therapy (without supporting or denying effectiveness), and offers a certification in it. The article just also says that there’s not enough data on it yet, and that nobody is really clear on how exactly the eye movement part of it works. Also the woman who initially conceptualized it didn’t have very good credentials. I’m cool with all that - I don’t think EMDR is as rock solid in provability as, say, molecular structure or straight neurology. Talk therapy of any sort is always gonna have a gradient of subjectivity for a whole lot of reasons.
My own EMDR didn’t have any lights or eye movement at all, it was vibrating things in my hands. And yeah sure, maybe a part of what helped me was really the chronological way the therapist started at the beginning of my life and moved forward one “event” at a time, or the coping mechanisms she taught me. But whatever the case, after 6 months of intense EMDR therapy I felt a hell of a lot better. I’m not ready to write it off just because there’s still more to learn about it.
And I for one didn’t think anyone lied to me or misrepresented it going in; I did my own research and understood the (relatively short) history of it as a procedure. *shrug*
That article is not just skeptical, it’s really patronizing - I have read some much better published explanations for how EMDR works than the ones that author is referencing. This piece by Scientific American also seems to debunk the eye motions having anything to do with it, but in a much less insulting way and one that I would think would ultimately assure you that (even from an EMDR skeptic’s perspective) you weren’t wasting your time getting emdr any more than you’d be wasting your time getting any good cognitive behavioral restructuring therapy: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=emdr-taking-a-closer-look It ends on this note: EMDR ameliorates symptoms of traumatic anxiety better than doing nothing and probably better than talking to a supportive listener. Yet not a shred of good evidence exists that EMDR is superior to exposure-based treatments that behavior and cognitive-behavior therapists have been administering routinely for decades.
But the comments are filled with people at least claiming to have PhDs, who are saying very interesting things about how biased those authors are, and how much evidence there really is in favor of EMDR - with LOTS of links and citations. They’re interspersed with anecdotal stories of great personal results.
One of my favorites of the first sort is from Patti Levin, LCSW, PsyD of Boston, MA and is currently #6.
(Source: ssscuttlebuttt, via andariel-sirene)
