An Update on Psychotherapy for the Treatment of PTSD.
The American journal of psychiatry May 1, 2025 Barbara Olasov Rothbaum, Laura E Watkins 13 citations
Most trauma survivors recover without intervention, but a minority develop chronic PTSD that requires treatment. Only two medications—sertraline and paroxetine—are FDA-approved for PTSD, with brexpiprazole-sertraline and MDMA-assisted therapy applications pending. Medication and medication-psychotherapy combinations are not recommended as first-line treatments. Instead, trauma-focused psychotherapies—prolonged exposure, cognitive processing therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, cognitive therapy, and trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy—are the only first-line interventions. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy trials have shown higher response rates than other combination treatments, though they have not incorporated evidence-based PTSD psychotherapies. The review covers these state-of-the-art psychotherapies and their clinical and neurobiological effects.