Post-traumatic stress disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a term for the psychological consequences of exposure to or confrontation with stressful experiences, which involve actual or threatened death, serious physical injury or a threat to physical integrity and which the person found highly traumatic. It is occasionally called post-traumatic stress reaction, to emphasize that it is a fairly normal result of a traumatic experience, rather than a manifestation of a pre-existing psychological weakness on the part of the patient.

Symptoms and their possible explanations

Symptoms can include general restlessness, insomnia, aggressiveness, depression, dissociation, emotional detachment, or nightmares. Amplification of other underlying psychological conditions may also occur. Young children suffering from PTSD will often enact aspects of the trauma through their play, and may often have nightmares that lack any recognizable content.

Related Topics:
Insomnia - Aggressiveness - Depression - Dissociation - Nightmare

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One patho-psychological way of explaining PTSD is by viewing the condition as secondary to deficient emotional or cognitive processing of a trauma (Cordova 2001). This view also helps to explain the three symptom clusters of the disorder (Shalev 2001):

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Intrusion.. Since the person cannot process the difficult emotions in a normal way, he/she is plagued by recurrent nightmares, or daytime flashbacks, while he/she realistically reexperiences the trauma. These reexperiences are characterized by high anxiety levels, and make up one part of the PTSD symptom cluster triad called intrusive symptoms.

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Hyperarousal. PTSD is also characterized by a state of nervousness with the organism being prepared for ?fight or flight?. The typical hyperactive startle reaction characterized by ?jumpiness? in connection with high sounds or fast motions is typical for another part of the PTSD cluster called hyperarousal symptoms, and could also be secondary to an incomplete processing.

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Avoidance. The hyperarousal and the intrusive symptoms are eventually so distressing that the individual strives to avoid contact with everything, and everyone, even to his/her own thoughts, that can arouse memories of the trauma and thus cause the intrusive and hyperarousal states to go on. He/She isolates him/herself, being detached in his/her feelings with a restricted range of emotional response, and can experience so-called emotional numbing. This avoiding behavior is the third and most important part of the symptom triad that makes up the PTSD criteria.

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The avoidance behavior could also be explained by a feeling of being different due to both the exclusiveness of the trauma and the strange and painful symptoms of intrusion and hyperarousal causing depersonalization.

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