Ida Bhatnagar
“It’s a war within yourself that never goes away.”
What is PTSD?
PTSD, the full form being ‘Posttraumatic stress disorder’ is a psychiatric disorder that might affect those people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, a serious accident, a terrorist act, war/combat, or rape or who have been threatened with death, sexual violence or serious injury. Earlier known to previous generations as shell shock, soldier’s heart, combat fatigue or war neurosis.
A person having faced a traumatic event may face flashbacks, nightmares, anger issues, intense stress, physical sensations such as pain, nausea, swear etc. These are the common symptoms of Posttraumatic Disorder, others being anxiety, the need to keep busy, finding work or hobbies to take out the anger, and many more.
Three extreme hits of this disorder is depression, suicide and substance abuse. Every person is different, they go through various traumas in life and each event strikes the person differently. Some might have little impact while others have greater hits of the disorder.
There are five stages of Posttraumatic stress disorder:
- Firstly, the impact or emergency stage where the person is highly anxious, hyper vigilant and trying to come to terms with the incident.
- Secondly, the denial stage, wherein the person voluntarily tries to avoid any acceptance or difficult emotions.
- Third being the short term recovery stage where the person tries to go back to their daily lives and bring back normalcy.
- Fourthly, the long term recovery stages herein the victim goes through the flashbacks and nightmares persistently however with treatment and support the negativity can be reduced.
- At last the recovery and acceptance stage, where the person overcomes the event and goes on with their life with minimal problems. Also on another note, it is not necessary that each person going through this disorder goes through all the stages of PTSD.
According to studies around 8 million people have PTSD in a given year with the estimate that 1 in 13 people will develop PTSD at some point in their life.
It is said by the doctors that at-least 70 percent of the adults face traumatic events in their lives and about 20 percent of them develop this disorder. In adults, 40 percent belong to the veteran and soldiers. This disease was not recognized in the army till 1980s and when recognized was earlier known as “shell-shock”.
Although not all soldiers suffer from PTSD due to combat, where only 17 percent of combat troops are women, 71 percent of female military members develop PTSD due to sexual assault experienced within the ranks.
Also numbers have shown that women are more likely to suffer from PTSD than men even though studies have shown that men grow through more traumatic events in life than women. The past year prevalence of PTSD in men is estimated at 1.8 percent, while PTSD symptoms affected 5.2 percent of adult women.
Like adults, this disorder can also affect the adolescent though the percentage of effect varies. It is found that about 5 percent of the adolescents face PTSD. Children and especially teenagers are still learning how to live in their own skin and face this cruel world. People might write off certain traumatic times such as typical school teasing, bullying, peer pressure etc. but might be very detrimental to a child or teen’s mental health.
PTSD is not necessarily a long term disorder, again it depends person to person and the impact of the trauma. It is noticed that the majority of people exposed to trauma do not develop long-term post-traumatic stress disorder. Getting timely help and support from loved ones may prevent normal stress reactions from getting worse and developing into PTSD.
The treatment of this disorder consists of medicine and therapy. Therapies include cognitive behavioral therapy i.e a talk therapy to extract the fears and dark thoughts to let the mind at ease, Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing and Exposure and response prevention.
Medications include SSRIs or Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are the most commonly prescribed antidepressants which help ease the symptoms of depressive moods and anxiety. They might have a few side effects but are the most prescribed by the doctors.
We know of all the risk factors of the Posttraumatic stress disorder like living through a dangerous event, getting hurt or seeing others get hurt, having a history of mental illness etc. But there are also resilience factors.
These factors are those that can reduce the risk of the disorder like love and support from family and friends, learning from past experiences, finding healthy ways to cope with it. A person going through might seem alright on the outside but might have an internal war going on, on the inside. It is imperative that we pay close attention to the change in our close one’s behavior after they have witnessed such circumstances because the earlier this is caught the faster the recovery.
