USF nurses get Army grant to help vets

Posted Sep 17, 2010 by Lindsay Peterson

Updated Sep 17, 2010 at 03:48 PM

Kevin Kip, principal investigator

The U.S. Army has given USF’s nursing college $2.1 million to start a new therapy center for Iraq and Afghanistan war vets.

To put the grant into perspective, it’s the equivalent of about $50 for each of the roughly 40,000 Florida vets now suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in these two wars.

The USF nursing researchers will work with only a tiny fraction of these men and women, but what they learn could offer hope to a whole lot more.

The new center, called RESTORE LIVES, will use the grant money to study five different ways to help veterans deal with their panic, depression, dark thoughts and nightmares.

“We’re trying to do the best science we can” to help these veterans, says Kevin Kip, associate professor and director of the College of Nursing Research Center.

One of the most promising methods, he says, is called Accelerated Resolution Therapy.

The way it works, subjects are asked to shift their eyes from right to left while also using techniques to replace bad memories with good ones.

“Antecdotally, researchers report excellent results,” Kip says. His studies will help show whether the improvements are real.

One of the other RESTORE studies focuses on women veterans, and a third is web-based, for people who have trouble leaving their homes.

Ultimately Kip envisions the RESTORE center becoming a hub for veteran therapy studies.

And he expects to work with some of the 1,000 vets enrolled in USF classes.

“Our veteran population is high, and the prevalence of trauma is so high in vets, in all likelihood, our students have these symptoms.”