Kristen Lindgren

Psychology professor travels to Iraq to help mental health workers treat PTSD

November 12, 2009

As a pre-doctoral intern Kristen Lindgren spent a year at the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Hospital in Seattle, working with U.S. veterans returning from Iraq. Later, as a postdoctoral fellow, she learned about Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), an effective treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) under University of Washington psychiatry professor Debra Kaysen.

In February 2009, Lindgren, now a psychology professor at Richmond, got a call from Kaysen, asking her to join in a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan — a trip that would bring Lindgren full-circle in her work with PTSD.

Kaysen had been contacted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University for her expertise on PTSD, as part of a larger project on mental health issues in Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the goals of the project is to identify the mental health needs in that region and find the best and most culturally adaptable treatments.

Lindgren and Kaysen traveled to Kurdistan in March, where they spent eight days training a group of physician's assistants in CPT.

“The region is very politically unstable and as a result, there are no upper-level graduate training programs for mental health workers,” said Lindgren. “They have tried to do as much as possible with very scarce resources.”

Training sessions were intense: while the language barrier required the extra challenge of a translator, cultural barriers demanded a new way of looking at mental health education.

“In both the U.S. and Kurdistan, mental illness has a history of stigma. In the U.S., one way to reduce the stigma associated with PTSD is to talk about it as natural recovery that got interrupted. In Kurdistan, recent efforts to reduce mental health stigma have focused on looking at it as just another kind of physical illness, with the same degree of importance,” Lindgren said. “We adapted our training to look at PTSD treatment with this mindset.”

Lindgren said that, initially, the language and cultural barriers had her concerned about just how effective the 64 overall hours of intensive training would be. By the end, though, she was amazed at how well the trainees both understood and were excited about what they learned.

“They were a really inspiring group of people, and such attentive students!” said Lindgren. “It’s been a really incredible process to be a part of.”

Lindgren and Kaysen continue to be in touch with the clinical supervisor of the group over Skype and hope to return to Kurdistan for further training.