In this review, early EMDR benefited people who already had symptoms

Interested to learn more about EMDR? Here's some recent research about it.

The paper is Early psychological intervention following recent trauma: A systematic review and meta-analysis, from the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 2019.

It pulled together 61 randomized trials of therapy that started within three months of a traumatic event and ran more than one session.

For people who were exposed to a trauma but weren't screened for traumatic stress symptoms, no treatment made a clinically important difference over usual care. For people who reported traumatic stress symptoms, trauma-focused CBT, cognitive therapy without exposure, and EMDR all showed a clinically important benefit, most of all for people diagnosed with acute stress disorder or PTSD. The authors say the evidence is strongest for trauma-focused CBT.

My take: in this review, EMDR benefited people who already had symptoms, not everyone who went through something.