Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms

Posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms involve the following:

1. The first post traumatic stress disorder symptom is exposure to a traumatic event in which the person: (a) thinks she or someone else is going to experience serious injury or death, and (b) feels intense fear, helplessness, or horror.

2. The second post traumatic stress disorder symptom is repeated re-experiencing of the trauma, in the form of intrusive thoughts, nightmares, flashbacks, or extreme distress when exposes to reminders of the traumatic event.

3. The third post traumatic stress disorder symptom is persistent avoidance of any stimuli associated with the trauma. There is also a general numbing of emotional responses. People may report they can't feel loving feelings, or just don't enjoy the things they used to.

4. The fourth post traumatic stress disorder symptom is persistent hyper arousal. This might be shown through decreased sleep, increased irritability, outbursts of anger, difficulty concentrating, an increased startle reflex, and panic attacks.

5. For a PTSD diagnosis, the duration of the re-experiencing, numbing, and hyper arousal is at least one month. The same symptoms occurring for less than a month would be diagnosed acute stress disorder.

6. These post traumatic stress disorder symptoms must cause the individual clinically significant distress or impairment in the social, occupational, or academic functioning.

Examples of traumatic experiences that may result in PTSD include rape, assault, car accidents, wars, fire, mining accidents, or natural disasters, such as floods and earthquakes. There is some evidence to suggest that traumas caused by people, such as violent crime or rape, are more difficult to cope with than natural disasters.

PTSD rates seem to vary depending on the type and duration of the exposure to a traumatic event. Whereas about 75% of the populations in the US is exposed to one or more life-threatening traumatic events at some point, only about 25% of these individuals progresses to full-blown PTSD symptoms.

When a trauma occurs, a fear structure is formed in memory. This fear structure includes three parts:

1. Stimuli of the trauma (sights, sounds, odors, and other sensations of the event).

2. Responses to the trauma (physiological and emotional responses to the event).

3. Meanings attributed to the stimuli and responses.

When people face reminders of the trauma, the experience unpleasant memories and symptoms that feel distressing. To relieve this distress, PTSD sufferers try to avoid trauma-related cues. However, while trying to avoid or escape from stimuli that produce intense negative emotions, these people struggle with the meaning aspect of their fear structure.

They have great difficulty incorporating their new beliefs about events with their previously held strong life assumptions and the inability to reconcile the conflicting views (a process known as accommodation) promotes the maintenance of PTSD symptoms.