Symptoms of PTSD
Those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can experience a wide variety of symptoms including:
Flashbacks
Nightmares
Depression
Constantly being alert
Easily being scared
Anxiety
Difficulty of maintaining close relationships
Difficulty concentrating
Difficulty sleeping
Feelings of guilt or shame
Alcoholism
Drug Addiction
Suicidal thoughts
Anger/Breakdowns
PTSD flashbacks can be triggered by a number of things. They can be triggered by sounds, places, people, and activities that remind the person of their trauma. Even the anniversary date of the trauma alone can cause flashbacks. These flashbacks are completely involuntary.
Flashbacks
Nightmares
Depression
Constantly being alert
Easily being scared
Anxiety
Difficulty of maintaining close relationships
Difficulty concentrating
Difficulty sleeping
Feelings of guilt or shame
Alcoholism
Drug Addiction
Suicidal thoughts
Anger/Breakdowns
PTSD flashbacks can be triggered by a number of things. They can be triggered by sounds, places, people, and activities that remind the person of their trauma. Even the anniversary date of the trauma alone can cause flashbacks. These flashbacks are completely involuntary.
PTSD & the Brain
This scan measures inflammatory response in the brain due to cortisol, a stress hormone which causes the “fight or flight" reaction. As you can see, PTSD sufferers experience large amounts of cortisol inflammation, which may impair mental performance, lower sensitivity to pain, and regulation of emotions. A brain of a person who suffers from PTSD has cortisol that is scattered constantly around the brain. This causes the "fight or flight" panic reaction more often than a healthy brain because it is easily tricked into an alarmed state.
|
The HippocampusTo observe how brains work after trauma, functional magnetic resonance imaging were used to compare 16 people who had PTSD symptoms with a control group of 11 normal brains. The scientists scanned the brains of the subjects during a simple test of verbal memory. Subjects read a list of words, then saw a similar list with new words added, and were asked which terms were present on the original list.
The hippocampus worked equally well in stressed and control subjects when the word list was first introduced. However, subjects with PTSD symptoms made more errors on the recall part of the test and showed less hippocampus activity than control subjects doing the same task. Subjects with the worst hippocampus function were also most likely to experience a specific set of PTSD symptoms: Such impairment of the hippocampus was strongly correlated with "avoidance and numbing" symptoms of PTSD, including difficulty remembering the trauma, feeling cut off from others and lack of emotion. “Even though I knew they were just fireworks on the 4th of July, to me they still sounded like incoming mortars. It took me right back to my deployment…” “Driving down the roads in my home town, I found myself noticing every piece of debris, avoiding every pothole.” PTSD can disrupt your life by:
|
The Hippocampus Cont.The bright regions in these scans (at left, a top-down view of the brain; at right, a view of the brain from the back of the head) indicate greater hippocampus activity in healthy brains during memory recall than in children with PTSD symptoms.
Treatment:
In recent years, researchers from around the world have dramatically increased our understanding of what causes PTSD and how to treat it. -Hundreds of thousands of Veterans have gotten treatment for PTSD—and treatment works -Counseling -Professional counseling can help you understand your thoughts and discover ways to cope with your feelings. -Medication Medications, called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are used to help you feel less worried or sad. |