What efforts are underway to improve mental health treatments for today’s veterans?
Although we do have effective treatments, unfortunately, they do not work for everyone, and they are not available to everyone. That is why NIMH invests heavily in research aimed at better understanding PTSD, developing more effective treatments, and improving access to care. Recent NIMH-supported research has made significant strides in understanding the nature of anxiety-related disorders like PTSD. Researchers today view PTSD as a brain disorder, related to specific circuits in the brain necessary for overcoming or extinguishing fear.8 Recently, scientists have discovered that “fear extinction” in the brain is an active learning process, not a passive process of forgetting.9 Researchers have identified at least one specific chemical that may help to improve the brain’s process of extinction learning, and it is currently being tested as an adjunct for treating PTSD.10 And they have identified periods at which people are most receptive to treatment that may facilitate fear extinction.
