Essay On Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Recommended Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) may be a new term, however stress related disorders were described in literature as far back as the Civil War in The Red Badge of Courage which characterized the youth experiencing anxiety symptoms during combat(Andreasen, 2010). Andreasen (2010) noted that during World War I, the psychological symptoms from the stress of warfare were described as “shell shock”. Later in World War II, soldiers were categorized again with anxiety, autonomic arousal, re-experiencing events, and sensitivity to stimuli from the extreme trauma (Andreasen, 2010). Pre-DSM, Alexandra Adler compared psychological stress with the stress reactions from head injuries during the Coconut Grove fire (Andreasen, 2010). During this time, it was articulated that stress has two main positions, the biological and the psychological. In the first DSM in1952 it included a category called gross stress reaction, which was defined as stress syndrome resulting from an exceptional physical or mental stress. Gross stress reaction was removed from the DSM-II published in 1968, and no further diagnostic criteria was available for stress disorders until the Vietnam War.

citizens have PTSD (Ghaffarzadegan and Larson, 2015). Over a half a million U.S. Veterans were being treated for PTSD in 2009 (Kobayashi et al. 2015). PTSD is a complex anxiety disorder which may result after experiencing a life-threatening or other traumatic event (Kobayashi, Patel, and Lotito, 2015). Examples of traumatic events might be a physical assault, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, wild fires, severe accidents, criminal acts, or acts of warfare. The development of PTSD should be understood as the interaction between the characteristics of the trauma and its defending factors (Frommberger et al.