Case Report: Visualization for treatment of insomnia, anxiety, and depression caused by PTSD

Abstract

Background: Depression and anxiety are disorders related to insomnia that generally affect quality of life, especially if they are related to traumatic events. One of the therapeutic methods that has shown effectiveness in treating depression, anxiety and insomnia associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the visualization method, which is a cognitive behavioral method. The aim of this case study is to investigate the effectiveness of visualization in treating symptoms of depression, anxiety and insomnia associated with posttraumatic experiences. Methods: Sulaiman is a university student who suffered with his family a painful traffic accident, and he has become unable to slee p. This affected his general life, so he became anxious and depressed and had nightmares when sleeping, which lasted for more than a year. He was trained on visualization exercises, including laughter, music, directed visualization, receptive visualization, programmed visualization, and others, which lasted for 17 sessions. Results: The results showed an average improvement of 77.8% for each of the symptoms of anxiety, depression, insomnia, and the number of minutes it takes to fall asleep. The results of the nonparametric test also showed that there were statistically significant differences in the ranks of measures, as it showed z-values for each of insomnia (z= -2.32, p=0.008), depression (z= -2.54, p=0.04), anxiety (z= -3.08, p=0.03), the time taken to enter sleep (z= -2.64, p=0.04), and the time spent asleep (z= -2.44, p=0.02). Conclusions: Sulaiman reported that he became more effective and said that depression, rumination, symptoms of anxiety and stressful thoughts had been reduced to a minimum due to learning more positive alternatives and effective and healthy fantasies.