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Summary: The most important things to look for in outpatient treatment programs for PTSD – i.e. post-traumatic stress disorder – include therapists with extensive practical experience treating people with PTSD and a commitment to following the guidelines and principles of trauma informed care established by experts from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Key Points:

  • Evidence-based treatment for PTSD is essential, delivered by qualified therapists up-to-date on the latest treatment techniques.
  • A positive, trusting, treatment alliance – i.e. a good rapport – with your therapist is as important as the specific treatment modality.
  • An environment that feels open, welcoming, compassionate, and collaborative can improve your treatment outcomes.
  • Your impression of the people who’ll treat you and the place you’ll receive treatment are important: when you feel safe and comfortable, everything improves.

Finding Effective Outpatient Treatment for PTSD

If you wonder what you should look for in outpatient programs for PTSD, that likely means that you have mild-to-moderate PTSD symptoms that are uncomfortable, distressing, take up significant emotional energy, and disrupt your daily life. Though disruptive, your symptoms may not completely impair your ability to meet your work, school, family, and social commitments.

However, they can make days very hard, can make you feel overwhelmed on some days, and – especially if you’ve been dealing with them for years – can be emotionally exhausting. You may also notice physical problems start to appear, as the result of chronic exposure to stress hormones.

If your symptoms are so severe they do consistently prevent you from meeting your daily commitments and responsibilities, then we encourage you to seek more immersive treatment, such as residential treatment, partial hospitalization treatment, or intensive outpatient treatment.

To learn about how we design our outpatient treatment programs for PTSD, please read our PTSD treatment page:

PTSD Treatment in San Diego | Help for Co-Occurring Trauma & Addiction

In every case, the best first step is a full psychiatric evaluation administered by a mental health professional with experience treating patients with PTSD and/or a history of trauma. Getting a full evaluation is important if you meet the following criteria or experience the following symptoms:

  • History of trauma: during childhood, adolescence, or adulthood.
  • Flashbacks to your traumatic experience
  • Avoiding any memories of the trauma
  • Avoiding anything that can trigger a flashback
  • Declining mental health: increased anxiety, depression, insomnia
  • Hypervigilance and/or hyperarousal: feeling constantly on edge, as if something bad is about to happen
  • Uncharacteristic/recurring anger/irritability

If you have a history of trauma and experience those symptoms, please understand that you’re no alone. Here’s the prevalence of PTSD in the general population of the U.S.”

  • Past-year PTSD diagnosis: 5%
  • Ever diagnosed with PTSD: 6%
    • Women: 8%
    • Men: 4%

Service members and combat veterans from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan range from 15 to 30 percent, with an average among all veterans of around 7 percent.

What Does an Evidence-Based Outpatient Treatment Plan for PTSD Look Like?

The first thing any outpatient treatment programs for PTSD must include is an awareness of the guidelines and principles of trauma-informed care. Here are the guidelines:

Trauma-Informed Care: Core Guidelines

Providers must:

  1. Understand how trauma affects lives.
  2. Recognize the symptoms of trauma.
  3. Avoid re-traumatizing people with a history of trauma.

Those three guidelines explain themselves.

Here are the treatment principles based on those guidelines:

Trauma Informed Care: Six Principles

Providers must prioritize:

  1. Safety
  2. Trust
  3. Peer Support
  4. Collaboration
  5. Empowerment
  6. Cultural, History, and Gender

The first five items are relatively self-explanatory, too. Patients need to feel safe, trust their therapist, have the support of people with similar experiences, contribute to their treatment plan, and feel like they have a voice and choice in their treatment.

Here’s what item 6 means:

Culture, history, and gender means therapists should recognize that people from different backgrounds may have a perspective on trauma and treatment that’s different than the standard paradigm, and that their point of view is valid, relevant, and should be respected and thoughtfully considered.

Those guidelines and principles should be reflected in every aspect of your treatment experience. Another thing to consider is whether the treatment center embodies core values of respect, compassion, and empathy on an organizational level. You can tell by the way the admissions staff answers the phone, how clinicians interact with you, their colleagues and support staff, and the general feeling you get from interacting with representatives on the phone and in-person.

The organizational ethos, visible at each level of interaction between you and the treatment center, can make a big difference in how you feel when you go in for an outpatient treatment session, and can influence your overall treatment success.

What Types of Treatment Should I Look For?

There are several types of treatment that have a significant evidence base showing their effectiveness of treating PTSD in an outpatient setting. To help people with PTSD, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (USVA) operates the National Center for PTSD. We can rely on their information because they’ve invested significant resources to researching the most effective ways to support combat veterans with PTSD, which are also effective for non-combat PTSD, which include:

  • Witnessing or experiencing war firsthand as a civilian, and/or living in a war zone
  • Sexual abuse, assault, rape
  • Emotional abuse
  • Physical assault
  • Emotional, sexual, or physical abuse during childhood
  • Witnessing or experiencing domestic violence
  • Serious accident, illness, disease, or injury
  • Natural disasters including fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes
  • Witnessing serious injury and/or death of another person

Both the USVA and the American Psychological Association (APA) indicate the following treatment modalities are effective in outpatient treatment programs for PTSD:

The VA also provides a resource called the VA/DoD 2023 Clinical Practice Guideline for the Management of PTSD they describe as follows:

“This guideline provides an explanation of the logical relationships among various care options and health outcomes while rating both the quality of evidence and the strength of recommendations. The information can be used to guide clinical care decisions and to identify areas of future research needed in the field.”

We encourage you to explore that resource, as well as the information provided via all the links above. Each explains what the treatment is, the evidence supporting it, what it entails in a practical way, i.e. what to expect, and the kinds of outcomes most often associated with that specific treatment modality.

The Benefits of Outpatient Treatment Programs for PTSD

The primary reason most people seek outpatient treatment for PTSD is to manage, reduce, or completely eliminate the symptoms we list toward the beginning of this article, such as flashbacks, avoidance behaviors, anxiety symptoms, hypervigilance, depressive symptoms, hyperarousal, irritability, self-isolation, and anger, among others.

When you receive treatment and learn effective strategies to address those symptoms, you can then improve or reduce disruptions in:

  • Family, peer, and partner/intimate relationships.
  • Work and school performance.
  • Decision-making and memory.
  • Overall physical and mental health.

In addition, outpatient treatment is an excellent choice for the following reasons:

  • You choose your schedule: timing, amount, and level of immersion
  • You decide how fast or how slow you want to go
  • Your treatment plan can work for you, in your life, right now
  • You set your goals – in collaboration with your treatment team – and learn what works best for you to achieve those goals.

Finally, you’ll learn tips and practical advice you can use right away – and apply every day – that can help:

  • Handle PTSD panic episodes
  • Manage flashbacks
  • Identify triggers for episodes and flashbacks.

For a detailed look at the things you can do to help manage PTSD in your daily life, please read the following article on our blog:

Are There Daily Habits That Can Help PTSD?

Finding Help: PTSD Resources

If you or someone you know needs professional treatment and support for PTSD, please contact us here at Crownview Co-Occurring Institute: we can help. In addition, you can find support through the following online resources: