By Nathan Brown
December 24, 2013
MIDDLETOWN – A clinic to treat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder will open in January in Middletown.
The Road Back Trauma Center, located in a former medical office building on Ridge Street in the shadow of the old Horton Hospital, will treat clients with an experimental technique espoused by Frank Bourke, the psychologist who will run the center.
The technique uses a “visualization process” to retrieve and alter traumatic memories, Bourke said. It is still in the research phase, but he said it has done well in clinical trials.
When people with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, have flashbacks, they are reliving traumatic events, Bourke said.
Bourke has already started to treat a few people in the building; he said the clinic would formally open and start seeing more people in late January.
Bourke learned about the technique 25 years ago, and applied it after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the Aon Corp. hired him to counsel hundreds of its employees who had worked in the south tower of the World Trade Center.
Ron Israelski, a local doctor who is on the clinic’s advisory committee, said he thinks Bourke’s technique will be more effective, in a shorter period of time, than other post-traumatic stress disorder treatments.
“This is a program that can cure,” Israelski said.
The center already has a $300,000 state grant to begin operations. State Sen. Bill Larkin, a Korean War veteran, sponsored the bill. Bourke said the clinic will cost $1.6 million to run for a full year; he said they’re hoping to raise more money from donors, the state and other sources to keep the project going.
More than 200,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with PTSD, a condition people can develop after exposure to a traumatic event such as serious injury or the threat of death. Experts on the topic believe many more are affected but undiagnosed.
The clinic is not affiliated with the osteopathic medical school that will open in the old hospital in August, but it is, in a sense, happening because of the medical school.
Developer Tony Danza, who owns the former hospital, also owns the clinic building. He is letting Bourke use it rent-free for a year-and-a-half.
Danza is a veteran, and this is one of the programs that he is working on to help veterans across the country.
New York Lt. Gov. Robert J. Duffy, Developer Tony Danza and Dr. Ronald Israelski.
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