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Research Highlights
San Francisco VA Medical Center Physician Awarded NIMH Grant to Study 9/11 PTSD in Disaster Relief Workers
Taken from the Veterans Health Administration Highlights dated May 3, 2002
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has awarded a new grant for research on mental health needs of emergency services personnel resulting from the September 11 terrorists attacks to Charles Marmar, MD, Associate Chief of Staff for Mental Health at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) and Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. NIMH funded four new studies through its Rapid Assessment Post Impact of Disaster grants program, which funds smaller scale projects that promise, in a relatively short time frame, to yield information helpful to the design of large-scale studies on prevention and treatment of mental illness resulting from exposure to mass violence.
Dr. Marmar is an international expert on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and has consulted on a number of natural disasters including the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. His new study will compare the effects of brief cognitive behavioral therapy to usual treatment for New York City disaster relief workers with PTSD related to the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.
NIMH supports a number of national health and mental health surveys that will provide a snapshot of mental health in the United States before and after the September 11 terrorist acts. This information will include data about the associations between exposure to the World Trade Center attacks and levels of overall distress and function, mental disorder onset or recurrence, medication use, substance abuse, and need and use of mental health services.
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