High-tech therapy tries to help return veterans with PTSD to normal lives

I know a lot of guys with PTSD. When you work, as I did, in the intelligence community, deeply intertwined with the military and particularly U.S. Special Forces, you make a lot of contacts, both professionally and personally, with people who have experienced firsthand the brutality of war.

It’s gotten to the point where I can recognize at once the telltale characteristics – physical jitters; frequent irritability; a tendency to vacillate between high energy and alertness or emotional numbness and detachment – of someone suffering from PTSD.

In fact, after more than a decade of ongoing global conflicts in which U.S. troops have been continually deployed, each of us knows many people – men and women – afflicted with this “disorder.” I put the word disorder in quotation marks because the medical and military community now recognizes that PTSD is anything but a disorder. Difficulty processing the inhumanity of war represents perhaps the most normal human reaction imaginable.

So when the “TechKnow” producers asked me to identify specific kinds of technologies that I might be interested in examining for the show, “anything to do with PTSD treatment” was at the top of my list.

Still, I admit to being stunned when I found out that one of the innovative treatments we’d be looking at was hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) – or the use of greater than atmospheric pressure oxygen in an enclosed chamber. The theory behind this prescription – in the research phase at over 5 Department of Defense hospitals with over 160 military volunteers – is that HBOT has been used for years to speed up the healing of visible physical wounds, so maybe it can expedite recovery from invisible ailments like traumatic brain injury (TBI), which frequently is correlated with the all-too-common psychological wound of PTSD.

At Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, I was able to enter a group hyperbaric oxygen chamber and try on one of the plastic helmets. Once on, it looks like someone has smashed a Poland Springs water cooler over your head. With the heavy door closed in the airtight chamber, one has the sensation of sitting in a ginormous cooker.

Being slightly claustrophobic, it was hard for me to imagine how this technology -- one enclosure (the sealed helmet) inside of another enclosure! -- might relieve any type of stress. That said, there’s a small television screen inside the chamber so that servicemen – there are no women participating in the Camp Lejeune study so far -- can “chill out” and watch T.V., while they’re pumped with 100 percent oxygen.

At Camp Lejeune, I was also able to chat with Corpsman Jacob Daldos -- diagnosed with a TBI and PTSD following a training mission in Uganda when an artillery shell exploded nearby. Daldos couldn’t tell me how the therapy, which includes 40 sessions over 12 weeks, makes him feel because to do so might corrupt the study results; but he could tell me, and he did, how desperate he was to “get [his] life back,” and how he’s willing to try anything that might help.

Later, I spoke to another veteran who echoed Daldos’ exact sentiments. Jonathan Warren is a Purple Heart recipient who served two tours in Iraq. Warren miraculously survived an IED explosion that destroyed the Humvee he and other troops were riding in while on patrol. Although he came out of that incident alive, Warren still feels guilty about not having done more to help a buddy who was trapped inside and who also lived but suffered horrific injuries and burns.

Warren now lives in his native state of California where he’s taking part in another study that applies atypical technology to PTSD treatment. While completely different from the HBOT the military offers at Camp Lejeune and elsewhere, Virtual reality therapy at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is also producing encouraging results.

There, psychologist Skip Rizzo directs the research and design of virtual reality systems, which are then implemented into a widely accepted and used PTSD treatment called prolonged exposure therapy (PET). A PET patient needs to verbally recreate traumatic memories over and over again in order to become, eventually, desensitized to them. This new approach enables the patient to recall basic details; advanced graphics and audiovisuals do the rest.

After Jon Warren and Skip Rizzo demo-ed the technology, I was able to don the virtual reality visor, strap on a replica weapon, and experience the process first-hand. While I had no wartime memories on which to draw, Rizzo thrust me into different stressful situations -- a crowded marketplace, replete with shadowy figures and high-volume shouting in a foreign language; a circuitous adobe maze with potential threats around every corner. When he made a vehicle explode loudly on-screen, I actually jumped.

Like Daldos, Warren said he was willing to try a variety of treatments, and he participates in one study after another in efforts to combat his lingering PTSD. (He’s also gone back to school to obtain a degree -- in none other than psychology. A silver lining to all he’s been through.)

Everyone I spoke to -- at Camp Lejeune and at USC -- agreed that there might never be a “cure” for PTSD. But the important thing is that after decades of ignoring this pervasive and devastating problem, the military, scientists, doctors and researchers are at long last collaborating to explore ways in which we as a society might treat our wounded warriors with the priority care and attention that they deserve.

Watch "TechKnow," Sundays at 7:30PM ET/4:30PM PT on Al Jazeera America.