What is post traumatic stress disorder?
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) or posttraumatic stress disorder is a mental disorder that arises after a person experiences or witnesses an unpleasant event.
PTSD is an anxiety disorder that makes the sufferer remember in traumatic events. Traumatic events that can trigger PTSD include war, accidents, natural disasters, and se**xual harassment.
However, not everyone who is reminded of traumatic events means being attacked by PTSD. There are specific criteria used to determine whether someone is experiencing PTSD.
Post traumatic stress disorder causes
The cause of PTSD remains unclear. However, it is believed that the facts that you experience, see, or learn about an event involving death, threats of death, severe wounds, or se**xual harassment, are the thing that can cause PTSD.
On the other hand, combined factors that can increase your risk of experiencing PTSD are:
- You have a mental health risk, such as increased risk of anxiety and depression
- You experience a number of traumatic events from early childhood.
- You inherit a particular aspect of personality or temperament
- The way the brain controls the chemical substances and hormones that the body looses as a response to stress.
Read also:
How to quickly relieve stress
Symptoms of PTSD
The symptoms of PTSD appear after a person experience an event that makes him trauma. The time of its emergence could be several months or several years after the traumatic event. The severity and duration of symptoms also vary with each sufferer.
Some of the symptoms that indicate a person experiencing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder are:
Memory in traumatic events
Patients with PTSD are often reminded of the events that make him traumatized. In fact, the sufferer feels as if repeating back the incident. The memory of the traumatic events is also often present in nightmares, so that people are emotionally depressed.
Tendency to dodge
Patients with PTSD are reluctant to think about or discuss events that make him trauma. This is demonstrated by avoiding places, activities, and someone associated with those traumatic events.
Negative thoughts and feelings
PTSD sufferers tend to blame themselves or others. In addition, sufferers also lost interest in the activity he had been liking and feel hopeless. People are also more self-righteous and difficult to connect with others.
Behavioral and emotional changes
Patients with PTSD are often easily afraid or angry, though not triggered by memory in traumatic events. This change in behavior also often harms herself or others. Sufferers are also difficult to sleep and concentrate.
PTSD can occur in children and older persons. However, in children, there is a special symptom that often reproduces traumatic events through the game. Children with PTSD also often experience nightmares that can be directly related or not with traumatic events.
Diagnosis of PTSD
To diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder, the doctor may do some of these things:
Physical examination
A physical examination is diagnosed to examine medical problems that may be the cause of the symptoms of PTSD.
Psychological evaluation
Conducting a psychological evaluation that includes discussion of signs and symptoms and events or events leading to the diagnosis of PTSD.
Uses DSM-5 criteria
It uses the criteria in the diagnostic Manual and Mental disorders statistics (DSM-5), which is published by the American Psychiatric Association.
PTSD Treatment
Treatment of symptoms of PTSD generally consists of therapeutic drugs and also psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy
Cognitive therapy
Cognitive therapy. Help the people to recognize how to think (cognitive patterns) that cause the death of the people in the process through the traumatic events.
Exposure therapy
Exposure therapy aims to help the people in order to face the situation and memory that is considered scary, so that the people can deal with it effectively. The therapy is efficient, especially in cases where the people with experiences a flashback or nightmares.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).
EMDR combines exposure therapy and a series of direct eye movement to help the people with process a traumatic event and the doctor will observe observe the reaction of the person.
Drugs
Antidepressant.
This medication helps alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, sleep disorders and impaired concentrations.
Antianxiety.
The drug helps relieve severe anxious disorders.
Prazosin.
The effectiveness of prazosin in relieving the symptoms and suppress the occurrence of nightmares is still in debate.
Thank you very much for reading Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Definition, Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Treatment, hopefully useful.
