Info about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Question

Does anyone have any information/or websites about PTSD ?

Answer 1

"Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a term for certain psychological consequences of exposure to, or confrontation with, stressful experiences that the person experiences as highly traumatic. [1] The experience must involve actual or threatened death, serious physical injury, or a threat to physical and/or psychological integrity. It is occasionally called post-traumatic stress reaction to emphasize that it is a routine result of traumatic experience rather than a manifestation of a pre-existing psychological weakness on the part of the patient.

It is possible for individuals to experience traumatic stress without manifesting Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, as indicated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Symptoms of PTSD can include the following: nightmares, flashbacks, emotional detachment or numbing of feelings (emotional self-mortification or dissociation), insomnia, avoidance of reminders and extreme distress when exposed to the reminders ("triggers"), irritability, hypervigilance, memory loss, and excessive startle response, clinical depression and anxiety, loss of appetite.

For most people, the emotional effects of traumatic events will tend to subside after several months; if they last longer, then a psychiatric disorder may be diagnosed. Most people who experience traumatic events will not develop PTSD - PTSD is thought to be primarily an anxiety disorder and should not be confused with normal grief and adjustment after traumatic events. It is also possible to suffer (comorbidity) of other psychiatric disorders; these disorders often include clinical depression, general anxiety disorder and a variety of and may be triggered by an external factor or factors."

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000925.htm


http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/post-traumatic-stress-disorder/DS00246

http://www.headinjury.com/faqptsd.htm

Answer 2

The National Posttraumatic Stress Disorder web site, associated with the Veteran's Administration, has some very valuable information. I've used it as a resource for my colleagues. It has a lot of information about the diagnosis, where it comes from, what one will see in someone with it, etc.

The VA, for obvious reasons, deals with the diagnosis with some frequency.

The second link is for the "What is PTSD?" page.