For the first time ever, an IPT paper has won the best paper prize of the American Psychoanalytic Association, APsaA.
At that association’s annual meeting in Boston, Massachusetts on June 2, Drs. Barbara Milrod, Jack Keefe, and John Markowitz presented the article, and received the 2019-2020 Scientific Paper Prize.
The article:
Milrod B, Keefe JR, Choo T-H, Arnon S, Such S, Lowell A, Neria Y, Markowitz JC: Separation anxiety in PTSD: a pilot prevalence and treatment study. Depression and Anxiety 2020;37:386-395
The researchers found a high prevalence of separation anxiety among military veterans with PTSD and found that measures of separation anxiety and affect dysregulation improved after 14 weeks of IPT for PTSD.
The pilot data suggest that IPT might work, at least in part, through repairing attachment.
Congratulations to all involved, to the psychotherapy community in general and especially in the IPT-society.
Been working with IPT-PTSD both in group setting and individual therapy and also PFPP (Panic focused Psychonynamic Psychotherapy)for panic disorders, I have the clinical/empirical experience that the results of this study make sense.
Anger, separation anxiety, vulnerability and intimacy are some the most difficult affects to deal with and the interpersonal situation where they take place. Being aware of the attachment anxiety connected to the interpersonal event and the underlying adaptive affect inhibited by the symptoms is the way to success -and to communicate needs in a new way with people in your life of course. That may mediate a relational and affective corrective experience.
IPT works with present interpersonal events, how to understand yourself despite the anxiety disorder and how to communicate and to make yourself understood towards others. It´s a practical and feasible way to create a secure base in the present moment. We don’t talk much about the traumatic events from the past. But we deal with the relational and affective aftermath of it. This so well deserved awarded study encourage us to keep on doing it.
