by Bob Gelbach of EMDR HAP
EMDR Humanitarian Assistance Programs is one of ten recipients of major funding to support “Welcome Back Veterans,” a joint venture of Chicago-based McCormick Foundation and Major League Baseball. HAP has received $250,000 for a project that will train dozens of clinicians in civilian agencies to treat combat related PTSD with EMDR and family therapy. The project will serve a minimum of 200 veterans and their families and will document efficacy of treatment in order to demonstrate to a wider range of agencies and communities that combat trauma is highly treatable.
Dr. E.C. Hurley will head HAP’s program, “Healing Combat PTSD,” relying heavily on HAP volunteers who have had extensive experience with this client population and with new EMDR clinicians. Dr. Hurley is a retired US Army Chaplain and Colonel, as well as a HAP trainer, marriage and family therapist and clinical psychologist. Other consultants to the project include Mark Russell, PhD., CDR, USN; Roy Kiessling, MSW; Nancy Errebo, PsyD; Howard Lipke, PhD., all EMDR trainers, as well as Beverly Dexter, PhD, CDR USN (ret.), AJ Popky, PhD, and Dr. Kathleen Wheeler, Professor of Nursing at Fairfied University.
HAP’s proposal was based on years of success in training VA and Department of Defense clinicians. The new grant will enable HAP to extend lessons learned to civilian clinicians and agencies in communities with high concentrations of veterans and their families. HAP will focus on three such communities, to be announced soon. The grant will provide extensive training and consultation, including specialty training in EMDR with combat trauma. Clinicians will be reimbursed for clinical service at the rate reimbursed by Military One Source, a major insurer of recent veterans. In return the participating clinics will agree to accept and serve veteran clients and their families, and document the efficacy of treatment provided.
Robert Gelbach, Executive Director of HAP, expressed his personal thanks to “the hundreds of HAP volunteers and donors from the EMDR community, as well as EMDRIA and the EMDR Institute, for their support of our work with veterans over many years. We are still counting on all of you to help make this project a success. We are very confident that EMDR will prove its efficacy in this project, and that resources developed through “Healing Combat PTSD” will soon become available to EMDR clinicians everywhere who have been eager to join in McCormick Foundation’s effort to Welcome Back Veterans.”
For more information, including contact information, please visit www.emdrhap.org.
This is what I’ve been waiting to see happen. I very much want this training, since I work on the fringe of a large VA with the National PTSD Center attached. I spent a good deal of effort getting licensed to take Tricare insurance to work with military families, only to discover Tricare does not reimburse EMDR. That is all right for now because there is plenty of Family Therapy work which can be done. I have wanted to work with returning soldiers since 2004 when it started to dawn on us in the field what the homecoming repercussions would be and how we needed to get up on line to do this work. I have been taking every workshop I could get to to begin to try to understand the military context. I probably never will, but I can identify it and appreciate the power of this experience for the men and women who have been in or even near combat conditions. I am a certified EMDR person with 10 years experience. Please keep me informed.
emdrhap.org (the link above) goes nowhere. Has it changed?
Jenny,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. The website has not changed, there was an error with the link above. It has been fixed, and is now working. Thank you.