Panel Discussion 5 - Approaching Exposure for PTSD: Ideas from Marketing, Theory, Tech, and the Clinic

Although prolonged exposure (PE) is a first-line treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with scores of research studies supporting its efficacy, PE remains underutilized outside many evidence-based clinical settings. One potential reason for this science-practice gap includes misconceptions or misunderstandings, among clinicians and patients, about exposure therapy–what it entails and how it is practically implemented. This is a decades-long issue requires novel ideas and innovative marketing approaches to enhance uptake of this powerful treatment. The proposed panel will provide six diverse ways to frame PE that are different from conventional packaging and which offer new avenues to appeal to clinicians. The six new frames include: 1) consider the pros and cons of referring to PE using the more felicitous “processing emotions” and how this alternative name could enhance uptake among clinicians who may be dissuaded by the term “prolonged exposure”; 2) discuss how clinical trials pairing psychedelics (e.g., MDMA) with PE may open the door to engaging psychedelically-oriented clinicians about the clinical utility of PE; 3) consider how the recent transdiagnostic proposal to rebrand/reimagine exposure as the practice of “approach” could attract clinicians to PE usage; 4) discuss how PE stakeholders can use the history of exposure practices in psychoanalytic/psychodynamic traditions to persuade adherents of those theoretical backgrounds regarding the clinical value of PE; 5) discuss engaging clinicians who treat substance use disorders to approach substance use as a potential safety behavior and employ PE to help patients fear less and use less; and 6) explore how tech-based crowdsourcing among clinicians provides exposure practice templates that can attract clinicians to PE and give them practical models for implementing it. The panel's ultimate goals are to share these novel ideas and refine them in actionable ways with attendee feedback to mitigate the longstanding science-practice gap in the field and enhance uptake of this evidence-based treatment for PTSD.