It is not uncommon for the average American to experience a traumatic event. Approximately 60 percent of men and 51 percent of women have reported at least one traumatic event in their lifetime.
A traumatic event can include witnessing or experiencing an injury, to more severe examples such as sexual assault, witnessing death or disaster, exposure to battlefield combat, or surviving a natural disaster or near-death experience.
Surprisingly, even though a traumatic event can cause a person to hurt both physically and emotionally, it will not necessarily lead to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In fact, only 8 percent of Americans who experience or are exposed to a traumatic event develop the disorder.
PTSD is a specific psychiatric disorder that results from some kind of personal injury - physical or psychological - that occurs once or multiple times over an extended period of time. When exploring PTSD as a possible diagnosis, often a person is experiencing issues that may include the inability to control feelings, difficulty with concentration and retaining focus, feelings of guilt or shame, problems with relating to others, physical pain or illness and a change in interpretation of their surroundings.
The emotional issues that come with PTSD also manifest in other areas. Problems that are associated with the emotional issues include substance abuse or dependence, extreme depression, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the development of bipolar disorder.
Although PTSD can cause serious complications in the everyday life of a person affected by the disorder, healing is possible. Clinicians help the patient reduce their symptoms and cope with the resulting issues through many differing paths of healing, often a process involving both the body and mind.
The most successful methods of treatment usually include a combination psychiatric medication, which is used to regulate mood swings, depression and the panic associated with anxiety, and psychotherapy treatments to help patients foster emotional stability.
Psychotherapy treatments can include any of the following: cognitive behavior therapy, which works on developing a positive relationship between thought and feeling; psychodynamic therapy, also known as insight-oriented therapy, which focuses on past experiences and their effect on the development of present behaviors; and bio-behavioral therapies, which are a very specific category of techniques that teach individual skills to better cope with illness.
The individualized combination of therapies is developed with a primary goal in mind: to better understand an individual's traumatic experience, teach healthy coping skills and support the individual as they move on to return to a life uninfluenced by the debilitating symptoms of PTSD.
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Guy R. Croteau is a licensed social worker at the Medical Psychology Center, an affiliate of Beverly Hospital and Northeast Health System, located at 100 Cummings Center, Suite 456J, Beverly.
