PTSD is a disorder in which an individual experiences a traumatic event involving actual or threatened death or serious injury to oneself or others and responds to the event with intense fear, helplessness, or horror.
What Are the Symptoms of PTSD?
Many people with PTSD repeatedly re-experience the ordeal in the form of flashback episodes, memories, nightmares, or frightening thoughts, especially when they are exposed to events or objects reminiscent of the trauma. Anniversaries of the event can also trigger symptoms. People with PTSD also experience emotional numbness and sleep disturbances, depression, anxiety, and irritability or outbursts of anger. Feelings of intense guilt are also common. Most people with PTSD try to avoid any reminders or thoughts of the ordeal. PTSD is diagnosed when symptoms last more than 1 month.
Symptoms include:
-a subjective sense of numbing, detachment or absence of emotional responsiveness, sense of being in a daze-derealisation
-dissociative amnesia
-the inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma
The traumatic event is persistently re-experienced in at least one of the following ways
-recurrent imagines, thoughts, dreams, flashback episodes, a sense of reliving the experience, distress on exposure to reminders of the the traumatic event.
Marked advoidance of stimuli that arouse recollections of the trauma, thoughts, feelings conversations, activities, places, people.
Marked symptoms of anxiety
-difficulty sleeping
-irritability
-poor concentration
-hypervigilance
-exaggerated startle response
