Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

There is a disorder that many individuals suffer from that most people may never see. People who have this disorder tend to hide it from others but cannot do so all the time. It can affect families, work and life in general for those that suffer from it. This disorder is known as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

PTSD is defined by The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology as “An anxiety disorder that emerges following a psychologically distressing, traumatic event such as a natural disaster, a bad accident, war or rape. The syndrome includes re-experiencing the trauma in dreams, recurrent thoughts and images, a kind of psychological numbness with an accompanying lessening of feeling of involvement with the world around

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is brought about by one witnessing/experiencing a traumatic event that mentally affects that individual to where they reexperience the event when triggered, as stated above in the defined verbiage. Most members that suffer from PTSD are military members but it also affects civilians in the same way. Seeing war, the loss of friends, car accidents and sexual assault are all aspects of how individuals may obtain PTSD. Signs of this disorder can be flashbacks of the traumatizing event, nightmares, terrifying thoughts, feeling tense or easily startled, difficulty sleeping and angry outburst. Children can also suffer from PTSD but have some different symptoms. They can be wetting the bed, forgetting how to talk, acting out the event they witnessed and being extremely clingy to their parent. Of course, of these can also be symptoms for adults as far as bed wetting and forgetting how to speak. The main form of effective treatment for PTSD is to see a psychologist. Psychologist can generally talk about the issue with the patient and help them find ways to cope with the trauma. The technique they use is known as Psychotherapy. There are two types of Psychotherapy, exposure and cognitive. Exposure is used to expose the person to their fear to help their body to mentally stabilize to the event while cognitive seeks to help individuals see the event in a more realistic way to make sense of the event and deal with it. There are also many prescription medications that can be prescribed to them to treat the high levels of anxiety, panic attacks and sleeping