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Community mental health clinics need cost-effective, well-tolerated treatments for PTSD.

The IFS therapy-based PARTS program is promising as a cost-effective treatment for PTSD.

A follow-up trial of the IFS PARTS program has also been completed.

The IFS PARTS program shows promise for addressing PTSD, complex PTSD, depression, anxiety, and suicide risk.

Co-authored with Alexandra Comeau, Zev Schuman-Olivier, Lawrence G. Rosenberg, Hanna Soumerai Rea, and Mary Catherine Ward.

Research suggests that the complex trauma and/or other psychiatric comorbidities that often accompany post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are not targeted by single-component treatments for PTSD. At the same time, community mental health care systems, which typically have limited resources and a high demand for trauma treatment and its comorbidities, are particularly in need of resource-efficient interventions.

Accordingly, the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance did a proof-of-concept research study called Program for Alleviating and Resolving Trauma and Stress or PARTS that was published in the journal Psychological Trauma in 2024. The PARTS program was conducted in an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse community health care system. It was based on the Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy model and offered 16 weeks of 90-minute online groups along with eight 50-minute individual IFS counseling sessions.

IFS, a non-pathologizing, destigmatizing therapy model, posits that PTSD symptomatology is protective and addresses common comorbidities like depression and anxiety as well as disturbances in self-organization, which are hallmarks of complex PTSD (C-PTSD). The PARTS program researchers hypothesized that pairing group therapy........

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