VA Gives Tranquilizers To 30 Percent Of PTSD Patients, Despite Warnings

The Veterans Affairs Department treats more than 30 percent of veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder with tranquilizers such as Xanax and Valium, despite clinical practice guidelines issued in 2010 warning against their use, VA’s National Center for PTSD reported.

The 2010 PTSD clinical practice guidelines, which also apply to the Defense Department, cautioned providers against using benzodiazepines to manage PTSD due to “the lack of efficacy data and growing evidence for the potential risk of harm,” the PTSD center said in in the March edition of its research quarterly publication.

Research shows that treatment of PTSD with benzodiazepine drugs “may interfere with the extinction of fear conditioning or potentiate the acquisition of fear responses, actually worsening recovery from trauma,” the center reported. This, in turn, may interfere with “first line” treatment such as exposure therapy, in which a trained therapist helps a veteran relive traumatic events.