Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Flashcards
What is post traumatic stress disorder?
- An anxiety disorder associated with experiencing or witnessing single, repeated or multiple events that could include:
- Serious accidents
- Assault (physical or sexual)
- Abuse (including childhood or domestic)
- Work-related exposure to trauma (including remote exposure)
- Trauma related to serious health problems
- War and conflict
- Torture
What is the prevalence of PTSD?
timated lifetime prevalence: 6.8% (these number will change according to the diagnostic criteria used)
Who can be affected by PTSD?
- can affect people of any age
- not everyone who experiences trauma develops PTSD
What are the most common causes of PTSD for men and women?
- men = combat
- women = sexual molestation
What are the range of symptoms associated with functional impairment in PTSD and allow PTSD to be recognised?
- re-experiencing
- avoidance
- hyperarousal
- negative alterations in mood and thinking
- dissociation
- emotional dysregulation
- interpersonal difficulties
What feelings are common in PTSD?
feeling of guilt, shame, sadness, betrayal, humiliation, and anger frequently go with PTSD
Explain re-experiencing in PTSD
- Trauma is re-experienced through intrusive and stressing thoughts, images, flashbacks, or nightmares
- Flashbacks feel ‘real’. Acting or feeling like the event is recurring.
Explain avoidance in PTSD
Avoidance of thoughts, feelings, people, places, and activities related to the event
Explain hyperarousal in PTSD
- Physiological reactivity (e.g. increased heart rate)
- Sleep disturbance
- Irritability
- Anger
- Hypervigilance
How can the characteristics of the event impact PTSD?
- Natural disaster vs traumatic events involving intentional harm (Ayers and De Visser, 2018)
- Stressors involving intentional harm appear more likely to cause PTSD than are natural disasters
- How deliberate human-caused stressors are judged to be also seem to be more important
What are the major other psychological factors that are prevelant in patients with PTSD?
- Personal impact of the event
- The extent of perceived control over future threats
- How one is prepared to deal with a stressor
- One’s beliefs and assumptions about trauma
- All affect how severe the impact of a stressor may be and how likely an individual is the develop PTSD
What are the major risk factors for PTSD?
- exposure to a traumatic event
- severity of the incident
- female sex
- younger age
- previous experience of trauma
- presence of multiple major life stressors
What is resilence?
Adult capacity to maintain healthy psychological and physical functioning after exposure to a potentially traumatic event
What are the main characteristics of resilient people?
- Process to a flexible adaption to challenges
- Sense of continuity in their beliefs about themselves/lives
- Retain ability to regenerate positive experiences
What medical conditions are likely to cause PTSD?
- Onset of illness can be stressful: E.g. MI, stroke, haemorrhage: sudden and life threatening
- Diagnosis of life-threatening disease: E.g. heart failure, HIV, cancer
- Prolonged treatment or unpleasant medical procedures
