A pragmatic randomized comparison of intensive EMDR and intensive PC for victims of crime

The intensive therapy format offers clients the opportunity to reduce time to treatment benefit, compared with conventional weekly therapy. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) has been identified as the most efficient of the leading trauma therapies. Progressive counting (PC) is less resource-intensive for therapists to master and may be at least as efficient as EMDR. Our objective was to evaluate and compare intensive EMDR and intensive PC.

We randomized 96 treatment-seeking victims of crime to intensive EMDR or intensive PC.

Participants experienced statistically and clinically significant improvements on measures of posttraumatic stress, presenting problems, level of functioning, and quality of life from pretreatment to posttreatment and follow-up, with large to very large effect sizes on all measures. There were no significant differences between EMDR on PC any outcome, including treatment efficiency, and dropout was minimal.

These results support previous findings regarding the value of intensive trauma-focused therapy and indicate that PC may be comparable to EMDR in the intensive therapy format. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).