How EMDR got a cancer patient through chemotherapy worry-free – in fact, she almost looked forward to sessions

EMDR, or eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, is a relatively new form of therapy used for PTSD sufferers

Breast cancer survivor Priya Menon says she felt no fear nor anxiety throughout her course of chemotherapy thanks to the therapy

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Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of therapy used for PTSD sufferers which links eye movements to how the brain process memories. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 5:00am, 11 Jul 2020Updated: 10:14am, 13 Jul 2020

Priya Menon was on holiday in Bangalore, India, when she first noticed a lump on her right breast. Initially she ignored it, but by the time she returned to Hong Kong, the intensifying pain pushed her to see a doctor. A biopsy revealed the cause: at 42, Menon had tested positive for breast cancer.

“I’ve seen many cancer patients, so at that time I was thinking, oh god, cancer is like a death sentence, it’s the end of the world,” she says.

But two years later, having undergone eight rounds of chemotherapy, Menon has fully recovered – and the now 44-year-old Hong Kong resident says she felt no fear nor anxiety throughout the course of her treatment. That’s thanks to a form of therapy called eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR), which she says aided her recovery journey.

Priya Menon before chemotherapy. Photo: Priya Menon

Twenty years ago, another cancer survivor, Francine Shapiro, completed a thesis partially inspired by her illness, which first introduced EMDR as a form of therapy in America. In her thesis, Shapiro described how directing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sufferers to move their eyes from side to side while thinking of a traumatic memory decreased or eliminated their symptoms after only one hour-long session.

Since Shapiro’s study was published, EMDR has developed into an eight-phase process, comprising history taking, patient preparation, assessment, desensitisation, installation, body scanning, closure and revaluation. The process is recommended for consideration by the World Health Organisation as well as in the US Department of Defence’s clinical guidelines as a treatment for PTSD.