Military & VeteransA two-week program for veterans and services members who have PTSD and other mental health issues, Rush Medical Center's Road Home is intense, fast, and efficient. Through evidence-based studies and experience, providers have found that this two-week intensive is far more effective than traditional therapy to help with symptom remission and increases in resilience.
Brian Klassen, PhD, is the Clinical Director of the Road Home Program, part of the Wounded Warrior Project's Warrior Care Network.
For information about treatments for PTSD please visit The Treatment Hub.
As a program at Rush we’re always evolving and always tinkering with our program. That it has changed quite a bit over the seven years now that I’ve been involved with it. And I think what we have done, emerging from COVID, is that we have I think a program that I am quite proud of. It’s intense, it’s fast, it’s efficient and we can get amazing results in terms of kind of clinical like symptom remission, increases in resilience within two weeks of a person starting the program. Which I think is, even a few years ago, was sort of unheard of. You know, because I think PTSD for the longest time had been thought of as this chronic sort of condition that, you know, the best you could do was kind of learn how to live with it and manage it because it wasn’t going to get any better. And I think we have kind of taken and shown that it doesn’t have to be that way. Just give us two weeks. The intensity of the treatment is a lot higher. I think the treatments that were originally developed have helped a lot of people, but they were sort of delivered in this traditional way of, you know, let’s do an hour appointment once a week or every other week. Because, you know, we don’t want to do too much, we don’t want to overstress you, we don’t want to give you too much that you can handle. And I think we kind of had this notion of like, let’s kind of turn up the heat, in a way. And I think the veteran communities responded in a huge way.
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About the author: Brian Klassen, PhD
Brian Klassen, Ph.D., is the Clinical Director for The Road Home Program: The National Center of Excellence for Veterans and Their Families at Rush University in Chicago, Illinois. Brian spent his formative years training at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center, completing rotations in chronic pain management, residential substance use disorder treatment, and PTSD. Brian has special expertise in providing front-line treatments for PTSD, including Prolonged Exposure and Cognitive Processing Therapy.
