Johanna Thompson-Hollands, PhD

Biography

Johanna Thompson-Hollands, PhD is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and a Staff Research Psychologist in the National Center for PTSD at VA Boston Healthcare System. Her work focuses on treatment development and outcome in PTSD, with a particular emphasis on the role of family and other social supports in enhancing outcomes and retention in PTSD treatment. Dr. Thompson-Hollands is the developer of the Brief Family Intervention (BFI) for PTSD, an adjunctive family-focused intervention that aims to improve veterans' outcomes in their individual trauma-focused therapy. She is currently leading a multi-site clinical trial to test the BFI in the VA.

In addition to multiple federal awards to conduct clinical trials related to family-inclusive treatments for psychopathology, Dr. Thompson-Hollands has also received federal funding to examine systems-level facilitators and barriers to family-inclusive treatment. The goal of this line of work is to promote the implementation of family-inclusive treatments in VA, ultimately increasing veterans' choices with regard to their care and addressing critical interpersonal variables known to impact psychopathology and treatment.

Beyond her work on family-inclusive treatments, Dr. Thompson-Hollands has a longstanding interest in enhancing PTSD treatments more broadly by improving their effectiveness and efficiency. She has been heavily involved in grant-funded projects and papers related to Written Exposure Therapy (WET), a brief 5-session trauma-focused intervention that demonstrates comparable results to longer trauma-focused treatments. Dr. Thompson-Hollands has extensive experience in training providers to deliver WET, including as a preventative intervention. She has also been lead author and co-author on several studies of WET, including long-term outcomes from the treatment and an examination of potential moderators of the treatment's effects.