EMDR: of limited use, whichever way you look at it

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence recently recommended a controversial form of trauma therapy called Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) for the treatment of post traumatic stress. In EMDR an individual is asked to create and hold in their mind a picture of the worst moment during the disaster, while following the movement of their clinical psychologist's fingers with their eyes. The psychologist instructs the patients to “let the image go freely where it wants to”. Some proponents believe this process has the power to unlock traumatic memories. Others are sceptical, among them psychologist Dr James Ost, an advisor to the British False Memory Society