Week 2: Developments

Hello, this is Robert Aubrey Webb here.

This week was a little all over the place, but not in a bad way. On the research front, I’ve found multiple sources that serve as great milestones for what I want to be accomplishing. One source has details on over diagnosing of PTSD in MVA survivors, which is a massive part of why I thought of doing this project in the first place. By reducing the over diagnosis of PTSD, we can more easily develop methods of aiding survivors. However, I found more sources that made me take a step back and rethink my approach. Until now, I’ve wanted the project to have a focus on developing new methods to aid survivors, and I still want to go about that. However, through analysis of resilience, my perspective has shifted towards a more “aid” centric analysis rather than trying to make a method to “fix” those who survived a car crash. Resilience is the concept of being able to endure difficult situations, and while I don’t have concrete numbers yet, the sources I’ve seen suggest a surprising amount of patients do not qualify for a PTSD diagnosis after a few months to a year, which lines up moderately with my experience with a car crash myself.

My internship had a lot of interesting developments as well. The main topic of this week involved getting me to understand what goes into the equine therapy. It was surprisingly effective and actually helped me make some realizations about myself that I’d never had before due to the unique method my advisor used. By working with the horses in a sort of metaphoric fashion, I was able to reason though my own thoughts and understand more about myself. However, this presented a new challenge that I discovered while thinking about this after the session was finished. Not every patient is going to want to go to therapy, much less actively participate. I was told this wasn’t necessarily a fault with the patients, as certain conditions can make it very difficult to be more outspoken about getting aid. But this concept is perhaps one of the most fascinating parts about what I learned this week: in order for a method to be effective, it needs to work in the face of passive, or even active, resistance on the patient’s end.

Tune in next week to see how these problems, and solutions, expand.