P.T.S.D. (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)

 

---

P.T.S. Links

 

What is PTS?

Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS) is a natural emotional reaction to a deeply shocking and disturbing experience. It is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.

 

For a doctor or medical professional to be able to make a diagnosis, he has strict diagnostic criteria, which has to be met.  He will do this by asking you a series of questions or listening to talk about an event or events in your life in which you feel significantly changed your behavior.  One recognized standard for assessing PTS

is the World Health Organization's ICD-10.

 

It was thought that PTS could not be a result of "normal" events such as bereavement, business failure, interpersonal conflict, marital disharmony, working for the emergency services, etc, and most of the research on PTS had been undertaken with people who had suffered a threat to life (e.g. combat veterans, especially from Vietnam, victims of accident, disaster, and acts of violence). It is now recognized that PTS can result from many types of shocking experience.

   

Examples of PTS

 

The person experiences a traumatic event in which both of the following were present:

 

1.    The person experienced or witnessed or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of     self or others;

2.    The person's response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror.

 

The traumatic event is persistently re-experienced in any of the following ways:

 

1.   Recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event, including images, thoughts or perceptions;

2.   Recurrent distressing dreams of the event;

3.   Acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring (e.g. reliving the experience, illusions, hallucinations, and dissociative flashback episodes, including those on wakening or when intoxicated);

4.   Intense psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event;

5.   Physiological reactivity on exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.

 

Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness (not present before the trauma) as indicated by at least three of:

 

1.   Efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings or conversations associated with the trauma;

2.   Efforts to avoid activities, places or people that arouse recollections of this trauma;

3.   Inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma;

4.   Markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities;

5.   Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others;

6.   Restricted range of affect (e.g. unable to have loving feelings);

7.  Sense of a foreshortened future (e.g. does not expect to have a career, marriage, children or a normal life span).

 

Persistent symptoms of increased arousal (not present before the trauma) as indicated by at least two of the following:

 

1.        Difficulty falling or staying asleep;

2.        Irritability or outbursts of anger;

3.        Difficulty concentrating;

4.        Hyper vigilance;

5.        Exaggerated startled response.

---

 

Links

Online Manual for Veterans suffering from PTS

www.ptsdmanual.com

 

National Center for PTS

http://www.ncptsd.va.gov/topics/war.html

 

Utah National Guard PTS Website

http://groups.msn.com/UtahGuardFamilies-PTSD/home