Rebekah Myers

In the United States, veterans experience Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) at rates far beyond the general population (Institute of Medicine, 2014). To respond to the growing mental health needs of veterans, The Veterans Center of Performing Arts (VCAP) developed DE-CRUIT, an arts-based PTSD treatment program that uses Shakespearian monologue and written personal trauma narratives (Ali & Wolfert, 2016). This proposed study seeks to understand the process through which PTSD symptoms are reduced with DE-CRUIT by examining meaning making, a critical component of PTSD recovery. Meaning making, typically achieved through writing trauma narratives, describes the process of seeing a situation differently to heal from it (Park & Ai, 2006). Participants will include 200 U.S. veterans divided into 20 groups of 10. Levels of PTSD will be assed via PTSD Checklist (PCL) – Military Version pre/post the DE-CRUIT intervention (Weathers et al., 1993). Meaning making will be assessed in trauma narratives describing a single traumatic event from wartime also written pre/ post the intervention by participants. Narratives will be divided into utterances (i.e., a single thought or action) and coded by a priori themes based on past literature indicating meaning making. Changes in number of utterances indicating meaning making and PCL score will be analyzed to explore the relation between meaning making and PTSD recovery to answer the following questions; How does participation in DE-CRUIT change the way veterans make meaning of their traumatic experiences? Is change in meaning making associated with change in PTSD symptoms in DE-CRUIT?