Quick summary: Paul Schulte, a former international banker turned trauma therapist, has launched Imover, a smartphone app offering ten self-guided EMDR audio sessions aimed at making evidence-based trauma therapy available beyond the clinic. Schulte draws on 22 years of experience in addiction and mental health, recent fieldwork training Ukrainian Army psychologists in Kyiv, and five published books to argue that PTSD remains dangerously undertreated, particularly among people in addiction recovery. The app raises important questions about access and professional oversight in trauma care, and signals a broader shift towards self-directed mental health tools for those who cannot easily reach a therapist.
A former international banker who retrained as an addiction counsellor and spent two decades working in mental health has launched an app designed to make one of the most evidence-based trauma therapies accessible to anyone with a smartphone.
Paul Schulte, who built his early career in financial markets across Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore before retraining through UCLA’s School of Family Medicine, has released Imover, an app containing ten self-guided audio sessions that walk users through eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing, more commonly known as EMDR.
EMDR is a psychotherapy approach originally developed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. It uses guided eye movements or other bilateral stimulation to help the brain reprocess distressing memories that have become stuck. Schulte, who has specialised in the therapy for six years, argues that the treatment remains out of reach for many people who need it most, and that Imover is his attempt to change that.
“I believe PTSD is a runaway silent epidemic among addicts,” Schulte has said. “This must be addressed to offer genuine hope of sustained sobriety. EMDR is ideal here.”
Schulte’s credibility in this space is hard to dispute. Over the past 22 years he has worked with clients recovering from family suicide, sexual assault, incest, military PTSD and career burnout. He has taught at eleven universities across four continents and has written five books on mental health, including an audiobook on EMDR that runs to 130 minutes and covers how and why the therapy works.
His most recent fieldwork took him to Kyiv, where he spent two months training 50 Ukrainian Army psychologists in EMDR and working directly with soldiers and refugees living with the psychological consequences of war. The experience, he says, sharpened his conviction that trauma therapy needs to scale beyond the therapy room.
The Imover app reflects that conviction. Each of the ten audio sessions is narrated by Schulte himself and is designed to guide a user through a self-administered EMDR experience without the need for a therapist present. The approach is not without debate in clinical circles, where the importance of professional oversight during trauma processing is well established, but Schulte contends that for many people, some access is better than none.
His background spans addiction counselling, trauma recovery, narcissistic abuse, burnout and what he describes as a growing mental health crisis among younger generations, driven by artificial intelligence anxiety, social isolation and the pressures of social media.
Schulte has appeared on Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, CNN, and ABC News in his previous career as a financial analyst, and brings the same appetite for broad communication to his work in mental health. With Imover now available and a body of published work behind him, he is positioning himself as one of the more prominent voices making the case that EMDR deserves far wider recognition than it currently receives.
