Psychological Factors Associated With Ptsd

Several different factors can contribute to how a person responds to a traumatic stressor and scientist and theoreticians have found other factors can determine individuals who are more likely to develop PTSD when exposed to a catastrophic event. These factors can include their past exposure to trauma, their mental health history, their families’ history of psychological problem, age, gender, biological makeup, social network, as well accessibility to mental health treatment facilities.

The New England Journal of Medicine States: “The defining characteristic of a traumatic event is its capacity to provoke fear, helplessness, or death. People who are exposed to such events are at increased risk for PTSD as well as for major depression, panic disorder, including generalized anxiety disorder.”

Those diagnosed with PTSD have shown a reduction in the volume of the hippocampus. The hippocampus helps humans remember new memories and then be able to recall them later, and also helps identify between past and present memories. The amygdala is another section of the brain affected by PTSD, and the amygdala is responsible for processing emotions and fear. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is shown to have a decreased size in cases. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex regulates negative emotions like stress, anxiety, and fear. The strange behaviours of the patients diagnosed with PTSD can be explained by the damage to the brain. “Researchers believe that the brain changes caused by PTSD increase the tendency of a person developing other psychotic and mood disorders” (brainblogger.com). The brain is like a machine made up of small parts, and if one of these parts break, the machine does not function

those who suffered the worst cases of PTSD had sustained stressful and traumatic childhood abuse. In the study, two groups of

PTSD can affect people in different ways due to the circumstance they went through, for example, “a young woman gets mugged and hit over the head with a pipe. Years later, she is still afraid to go out at night by herself. She has trouble making friends and she is slow to trust people. She has gotten several warnings at work for missing days; sometimes she just can’t seem to get out of bed. A former soldier, when he finally sleeps, finds himself back on the dusty roads of Afghanistan. He awakes in a panic and struggles futilely to return to sleep. Days are hardly better. The rumble of garbage trucks shatters his nerves. Flashbacks come unexpectedly, at the whiff of certain cleaning chemicals. He is imprisoned in his own mind” (Brainline,

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) develops after a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical harm. The person who develops PTSD may have been the one who was harmed or the person may have witnessed a harmful event that happened to loved ones or strangers.

As stated above, war is the most common trauma that causes PTSD. For many Veterans, memories of their wartime

The cause of PTSD is unknown. The factors involved are psychological, genetic, physical, and social. Post-traumatic stress disorder changes the body’s response to stress. It affects the stress hormones and chemicals that carry information between the nerves. It is not known why traumatic events cause PTSD in some people and not others. But studies have shown that having a

I learned that this was not an illness to be miniaturized in terms of its emanation or corollary. It came with ramifications that I wouldn 't wish upon, even the worst of my enemies. The many it had inflicted upon me, I learned I was no match for alone. Again, I was caugt in a sea of dipsomania with no raft or life preserver. I was sure this time that I had finally rolled an unlucky number on life 's crap table.

These traumatic events overwhelm the mind and the affected is unable to process information and feeling. The individual experiencing PTSD goes through feels and thoughts during their traumatic event that interrupts the mind and causes distress. PTSD is not only related to combat; as shell shock was, but also can occur from a rape, witnessing a murder, combat, and a disaster. A person can also develop post-traumatic stress disorder from seeing or learning about an event, which can cause death or even injury. The person dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder goes through a chemical imbalance that affects their mood and anxiety. These imbalances cause the infected to go through different levels of mental behavior, from avoidance, flashbacks, dreams of the traumatic event, angry outbursts or aggressive behavior and trouble

“When I was in serious danger I was almost completely paralysed by fear, I remember sitting with a coffin (a fellow soldier) on the fire-step of a trench during an intense bombardment, when it seemed certain that we must be killed”(The Psychological Effects Of The Vietnam War). Our soldiers that we send to war to protect us against the countries trying to harm us are put into dangerous situations that affect them physically and mentally and leave them with permanent damage to their minds and bodies. The server damage that our military soldiers faced when returning from war is PTSD which stands for post traumatic stress disorder and is the most common disorder that returning soldiers are diagnosed with , but a more tragic diagnosis from war

Traumatic events and experiences are universal, 60% of men and 51% of women in the general population have reported at least 1 traumatic event in their lives (van der Kolk et al. 2007). Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can occur after the exposure to a traumatic event. It affects approximately 1 million Australians in any one year, and 12% of Australians will experience PTSD symptoms in their lifetime (Beyond Blue, 2015). A clinical component of PTSD is the painful re-experience of the traumatic event in the form of intrusive images, nightmares and flashbacks which are often accompanied with avoidant reactions and symptoms of arousal and distress (American Psychiatric Association,

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects 7.7 million American adults and can also occur during childhood. PTSD is an anxiety disorder that stems from a recent emotional threat such as a natural, disaster, war, and car accidents. PTSD usually occurs from an injury or coming close death. A person who has experienced a past traumatic event has a heightened chance of being diagnosed with PTSD after a current trauma. PTSD can also be determined by looking at one’s genes, different emotions, and current or past family setting. Normally, when a person without PTSD goes through a traumatic event the body releases stress hormones, which in time returns back to normal; However, a person with PTSD releases stress hormones that do not return

Frounfelker, Klodnick, Mueser, & Todd (2013) conducted a qualitative study to examine the relationship and predictors of PTSD in youth. True Experimental Design with the use of posttest only equivalent groups was facilitated with the use of this study. It was used to make a comparison of control group of youth with PTSD to the treatment group of youth without PTSD. The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of the correlations and predictors of PTSD in youth that has transitioned and living in a supported community housing (Frounfelker et al., 2013).

The amygdala is known to learn from exposure to fear and store assessment of threat–related stimuli. The prefrontal cortex is involved in extinction and the retention of fear and is connected to the amygdala. Finally, the hippocampus encodes the context during fear learning process and sends it to the amygdala. People with PTSD have hyper-activity in the amygdala, while having hypo-activity in the prefrontal cortex and there is reduction of the hippocampus volume. This reduction may limit proper evaluation and categorization of the experience. A study on Vietnam soldiers revealed that lesions in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex resulted in the absence of PTSD. To get further into the molecular level studies been done on the hormonal system. “Stress is known to contribute to the pathogenesis of a variety of disorders, including the majority of psychiatric like major depression and posttraumatic stress disorder.” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3825244/pdf/DM30-02-343616.pdf). Research has revealed evidence that a hormonal system known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is the one that gets disrupted in people with PTSD. The hormonal system is involved in normal stress reactions, so the disruption of this system in people with PTSD creates this “false alarm”. It has been suggested by some scientist that the dysfunction of the HPA system results in hippocampal damage in people with PTSD. Damage in the hormones is caused by damage to