In honor of veteran’s/Remembrance/Armistice day on November 11th, we feature a new article on treating veterans. A new JAMA Network Open randomized trial by Wood and colleagues compared Warrior Renew, an eight-session military-sexual-trauma-focused virtual group, with an active health-and-wellness group in 140 veterans. Warrior Renew used cognitive and experiential strategies, including imagery reprocessing, and addressed themes such as self-blame, shame, injustice, anger, grief, and interpersonal disruption. The comparison group emphasized behavioral engagement and weekly health goals.
Both groups improved significantly in PTSD symptoms, and there was no statistically significant overall between-group difference on the PTSD checklist. However, the trauma-focused group showed greater short-term improvement in posttraumatic cognitions and self-blame, and it was the only condition whose average change crossed the study’s 10-point meaningful-improvement threshold at week 16. Dropout was approximately 11% in both conditions.
Clinical Takeaway: For PTSD involving repeated interpersonal trauma, betrayal, institutional injustice, or disrupted relationships, assess self-blame and trauma-related meaning explicitly rather than focusing only on fear activation around one index event. Cognitive restructuring, imagery-based work, grief and anger processing, and interpersonal themes may be particularly relevant. A structured virtual group may also improve access, although this study did not compare Warrior Renew directly with CPT or prolonged exposure and had only a 16-week follow-up.