Oregon Public Broadcasting

Treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder isn't easy. Anti-depressants and sleeping pills can help, but often they’re only treating the symptoms and not the illness itself.

So scientists at Oregon Health and Science University are starting a new study -- to find out if alternative therapies -- like meditation -- can help.

But as Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, there’s a problem. Researchers are having difficulty getting PTSD sufferers to sign up for their study.

Foden-Vencil: "How are you going to overcome that?"

Wahbeh: "Well, I think reaching out to a greater population and I know that there are people with PTSD out there who are really committed to helping us learn more about exactly what is going on, so we can help them."

Another way to attract sufferers might be to have a reporter take the test – to show that it isn’t so bad.

Wahbeh: "This is going to measure your respiration."

Foden-Vencil: "Do you need me to take my shirt off or anything like that?"

Wahbeh: "No, you’re all good."

For the next 20 minutes Doctor Wahbeh attaches electrodes to my head, hands and chest. A blood pressure monitor goes on my finger and researchers play soothing tones to help me relax.

Then, a computer monitor flashes bloody pictures from bomb attacks, combat missions and car crashes.  It’s a grim showcase, but since I don't suffer from PTSD there are no severe reactions.

Terry Allen is a former Marine, who served in the Vietnam War. As a subject in the OHSU study, he saw the same images.  

Allen: "Some of them were a bit startling. But they were relatively mild, relative to the memories….Did it trigger any more nightmares? Not necessarily, they’re kind of random."

Allen says he volunteered so that soldiers in the future don't have to go through the PTSD he's wrestled with for the last 40 years.

Allen: "Without an outlet to discuss it with somebody or to try to work through it, it just sits and festers and you try to cover it up and it never really goes away."

But what makes Doctor Wahbeh and OHSU think that meditation can help someone who sufferes from PTSD?

Wahbeh: "The frontal part of people with PTSD’s brain is hypo-functioning, meaning it has less activation. And their emotional centers are increased in activation. What’s interesting is that studies in meditation show the opposite effect. And so we anticipate that doing meditation on a regular basis may be able to shift this pattern in people with PTSD and that’s why we’re running this study."

Wahbeh is Palestinian, and her family members have experienced more than their fair share of war. That's one of the reasons Wahbeh says she was drawn to this area of science. If she can find enough PTSD suffers to study, her results could be published in a couple of years.