Every year across the nation, hundreds of men and women return home from combat in battle zones around the world. Many suffer from post-traumatic stress. Many have trouble integrating back into civilian life. But seeking psychological help often carries a stigma for veterans, and many avoid help.
Research with survivors of other traumatic events suggests that writing about the event can be helpful. Can an online writing intervention be one way to bring relief to returning veterans?
Patricia Frazier, a professor of psychology, aims to find out. She is a member of several teams of researchers designing this and other studies that translate theory into practical methods that may make a difference in people’s lives.
About a thousand veterans will be writing in the privacy of their own homes, libraries, and cafes around the country in a federally funded study that runs through next year.
Because of the high quality of Frazier’s work and its wide-ranging impact, she was named a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 2010. Her research is helping not only returning veterans but victims of sexual assault, immigrant survivors of trauma, organ transplant patients, and college students—one of the highest risk groups for experiencing a traumatic event.
Frazier was growing up in Chicago when eight students were murdered in their apartment. A ninth survived.
“I remember thinking, ‘How could you survive that? What would it be like to live with that memory?’” says Frazier.
As a shy student at St. Olaf College, Frazier majored in psychology with a minor in philosophy. She thought about law school. After graduation she got a job in a law office where an attorney was working on a case, headed for the Minnesota Supreme Court, that involved expert testimony related to rape.
Frazier pursued graduate school in psychology instead of law school, drawn to the highly ranked psychology program at the University of Minnesota. She soon met Professor Gene Borgida, who was doing research on expert-witness testimony, and made a connection that would bring her interests together.
After her Ph.D. in 1988, Frazier took a position at the University of Missouri but returned to Minnesota for a tenure-track position in 1990. Since then, her contributions have only strengthened the University’s national and international reputation.
Today Frazier is a leading investigator in three broad areas: causal explanations for traumatic events, post-traumatic stress, and personal growth after trauma.
Perception of personal control has long been recognized as playing a central role in how people adjust to threatening events. In 2003, Frazier published an ingenious study that differentiated perceptions of past, present, and future control. She and her team of students is now working on interventions to try to increase the most helpful kind of perceived control—over what can actually be controlled in the present.
In 2005, Frazier formed a group of investigators across the nation in a multisite study. More than 1,500 young adults were screened and tracked in order to include some who would undergo a potentially traumatic experience in the next few months. The study, published in 2009, showed that people’s real growth after trauma doesn’t match what they report. Because previous studies in this area have relied on self-reports, Frazier and her colleagues called for developing new ways to measure post-traumatic growth.
“Full credit for this exceptionally important study goes to Dr. Frazier, who was both the brains and the brawn behind the entire operation,” says Howard Tennen, a professor and colleague at the University of Connecticut Health Center. “Her co-investigators simply watched in awe as she did all of the heavy lifting.”
Many of Frazier’s studies involve building relationships and partnerships with community organizations and groups, a process that is time consuming and complex. Trauma survivors are hard to recruit into research projects. Providers are overburdened. And all studies must meet the highest professional, local, and federal standards to protect participants.
Frazier has repeatedly met the challenge.
“It’s a gift to have a job where you can come up with ideas and design projects that address problems that are both theoretically interesting and practically important,” she says.
A surprise, says Frazier, has been the increasing role that technology can play. Intervention studies now underway with her large team of graduate and undergraduate students include online writing for returning veterans, use of videos in hospital treatment of sexual assault victims, and online activities for people waiting to be seen in counseling clinics.
“There is so much going on with technology,” she says. “Our goal is getting psychology out there to help people.”
Frazier’s impact comes not only from bridging theory and practice but from the rigor and high reputation of her methodology, its relevance across many areas of psychology, her powerful publishing record, and teaching and mentoring at both the graduate and undergraduate level.
“Students in psychology are often motivated by wanting to help people,” says Frazier. “I want them to know that a research career also can help people.”
Frazier is known to her students as challenging and accessible, a tough reader and analyst with high standards. “I’m the type that tears things apart,” she says. “I like working with graduate students and seeing them develop their professional skills.”
Students will benefit from the McKnight award, too. It will enable Frazier to provide assistantships for research they otherwise couldn’t do, carrying its impact into the next generation.
Read more about Frazier’s work in “Finding hope in tragedy” (winter 2001-02) and “Trauma revisited” (2008).
Patricia Frazier, psychology: Coping with traumatic life events
March 22, 2011
Profiles