ReadingWise International

We belive mental trauma (PTSD, panic attacks etc) is the most underrated cause of misery in the world today. 

There is a simple cure for it which is rarely used.  It works superbly well, and does NOT need a mental health professional, or drugs.  Around 90% of all PTSD cases we have seen over the last 35 years were cured of PTSD in a few hours of session time.  

We can teach this technique in one weekend.  We are doing this on Zoom right now to people in India, Nepal and West Africa on a small scale.  We want to train a thousand trainers and to have a quarter of a million people de-traumatised.  Then, by publishing the results, we want to offer it as a copiable solution for any community, NGO or mental health delivery centre to tackle this problem mental trauma.

I have a track record of succesfully doing a project just like this.  I am responsible for India's most successful adult literacy program of recent years - Tara Akshar.  Since 2005, we have trained a thousand trainers and made nearly a quarter of a million illiterate women literate.  

I trained as a PTSD specialist.  I co-founded a therapy delivery center in London in 1995, funded by local and state government, which treated traumatised crime victims in South London, referred to us by the police.  My stats there were 89% PTSD fully cured in less than 20 hours of one-to-one session time.  

I got head-hunted to Miami to co-found a similar center in the State Attorney's office.  The Miami center is still going strong. It has trained hundreds of therapists and changed the lives of thousands of crime victims.

I went to India 20 years ago, but found no mental health infrastructure, and my target audience of domestic abuse victims were mostly illiterate.  So I wrote a literacy program which has been enormously successful and is still going strong.  It's been funded by DfID, IDRC, IKEA Foundation, Oxfam and others.   

Since lockdown, I have been writing an app that enables any lay person with a weekend's online training and a smartphone to become a competent trauma therapist.  I have started running weekend Zoom training sessions in West Africa and India and Nepal in collaboration with various NGOs and it has been very successful.  Now I want to scale up! 

9% of US adults get PTSD.  The figure is probably similar for other countries.

Around 5% of US adults get panic attacks.

There are 68 million refugees in the world, many of whom will have PTSD.

Around 25% of all women have been raped or suffered domestic violence.  Many of them will suffer long-term PTSD from that.

29% of WW2 prisoners with PTSD still had symptoms more than 40 years after the conflict ended.

There are 40 million victims of human trafficking globally.  In our experience, nearly all of them have PTSD.

Almost half of all trans people in the UK have tried to commit suicide.  

We use a technique called TIR - Traumatic Incident Reduction.  It is a one-to-one talk therapy technique which only takes a few hours to work.  It involves the victim replaying incidents in their head over and over again until either a) the video in their head disappears completely together with the associated emotional distress, or b) an earlier similar incident emerges, in which case that is replayed over and over again.  It is delivered using Rogerian principles of non-evaluation.  Unlike conventional flooding techniques, it is highly directive.

Training anyone in TIR takes a weekend.  We do supervisory follow-up.

Domestic violence victims can be found the whole world over.  Many, if not most, are traumatised.  A significant percentage will have full blown PTSD.  In the US, they may have health insurance and can go see a mental health professional who may or may not help them. But in most of Africa and most of South Asia (almost half the world's population), the only mental health services are in large towns, and most of them don't know how to treat PTSD, and the few effective therapists are financially out of reach to most sufferers.

There will NEVER be enough psychiatrists and psychologists.  They take too long to train.  But we don't need them!  We can train anyone to cure PTSD in a weekend's training.  We are going to get people doing peer-counselling.  Apart from Vikram Patel in Goa, we don't know of anyone else doing this level of peer counselling.  Yet my colleagues have been training non-psychologists and non-psychiatrists for years.

Up till now we were doing literacy and life skills.  

Now we are applying the same organisational and training skills to training people to deliver trauma therapy.   Our organisation skills and our pedagogic skills were honed setting up and delivering our programs to hundreds of village and town learning centres around India.  The success of our literacy program depended on building a superb app which has worked almost unchanged for 16 years.  

For the trauma training, we have built another app, called SessionWise, but we will use the same organisation methods.  Even if the trainer is not so hot, all the information (as well as quizzes etc) is on the app.  It will run on any laptop or smartphone.  (The most remote regions of Africa and South Asia do  have smartphones in our experience!)  

We will use the same excellent monitoring and evaluation techniques which served us very well in our previous programs.