Comparison of Efficacy of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Posttraumatic stress disorder is an anxiety disorder that occurs in people who are exposed to psychological traumatic events. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of three methods of EMDR, CBT, and EFT therapy on the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in patients with neurology in northern hospital of Kerman.

The research method was semi-experimental with pre-test-post-test and follow-up design with control group. The statistical population consisted of all patients referring to Neurology and Neurology Hospital of Kerman in 2018. Using a targeted accessible sampling, 60 patients with diagnosis PTSD were randomly assigned to three experimental groups and one control group. The participants at the EMDR sessions were treated individually in 6 sessions of forty-five minutes, and the CBT and EFT groups were grouped in 6 sessions forty-five minutes. All subjects were evaluated in three stages of pre-test and post-test and follow-up by a post-traumatic stress disorder questionnaire.

The results of analysis showed that the symptoms of post-traumatic stress in all three experimental groups significantly decreased. For the experimental group EMDR (p<0.02, F=6.13), for the experimental group EFT (p<0.02, F=5.33) and for the experimental group CBT (p<0.03, F=4.82) Is significant at the level of 0.001.

All three EMDR, CBT and EFT groups reduce the symptoms of post-traumatic stress in post-traumatic patients, but the post-test results showed that EMDR intervention was more effective than the other two methods in reducing the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.