PTSD
PTSD can start after any traumatic event. A traumatic event is one where you see you are in danger, your life is threatened or you see other people dying or being injured.
Typical traumatic events include:
- Serious accidents.
- Military combat.
- Violent personal assault (sexual assault, physical attack, abuse, robbery, mugging).
- Being taken hostage.
- Terrorist attack.
- Being a prisoner of war.
- Natural or man-made disasters.
- Being diagnosed with a life threatening illness.
- Hearing about unexpected injury or death of a family member or close friend.
The symptoms of PTSD can start immediately or after a delay of weeks and months, but usually within 6 months.
What is PTSD?
Many people feel grief-stricken, depressed, anxious, guilty and angry after a traumatic experience. As well as these understandable emotional reactions, there are three main types of experiences.
Avoidance and numbing
- It can be just too upsetting to re-live your experience over and over again.
- So you distract yourself.
- You keep your mind busy by losing yourself in a hobby, working very hard, or spending your time absorbed in crosswords or jigsaw puzzles.
- You avoid places and people that remind you of the trauma, and try not to talk about it.
- You may deal with the pain of your feelings by trying to feel nothing at all by becoming emotionally numb.
- You communicate less with other people who then find it hard to live or work with you.
Flashbacks and nightmares
- You find yourself re-living the event, again and again.
- This can happen both as a ‘flashback’ in the day and as nightmares when you are asleep.
- These can be so realistic that it feels as though you are living through the experience all over again.
- You see it in your mind, but may also feel the emotions and physical sensations of what happened such as fear, sweating, smells, sounds, pain.
- Ordinary things can trigger flashbacks.
- For instance, if you had a car crash in the rain, a rainy day might start a flashback.
Being ‘on guard’
- You find that you stay alert all the time, as if you are looking out for danger.
- You can’t relax.
- This is called ‘hyper-vigilance’.
- You feel anxious and find it hard to sleep.
- Other people will notice that you are jumpy and irritable.
Video
The following video ‘What PTSD is really like’ contains first person accounts of PTSD.