Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is an anxiety disorder thought to be caused by exposure to a traumatic event. People with PTSD can be victims from sexual or physical abuse, people that experienced a car accident, or soldiers coming back from the military. What happens with these people is that they relive a terrifying moment over and over again. The strong memory can be brought back by small things like seeing something that reminds them of the event and all of a suddenly they feel all the emotions they felt at the occasion of the actual event. Symptoms of PTSD often includes thing like flashbacks, hyper-arousal, nightmares and isolation. Victims of abuse might choose to be more is isolation because they are scared of the outside world and they think that what happened to them once will happen again, and that it is unenviable. These people as well as veterans have another strong reason for not wanting to interact with people; they feel like nobody can relate to what they've been through. They feel like people sometimes make fun of them for being so "dramatic" and that it can feel pointless to be around people who do not understand what it feels like have seen death. Some also have trouble getting close to people again because they are scared that they are going to lose them and they want to avoid that kind of pain again. Many of the soldiers coming back form war also have survivors guilt. They start questioning why they survived and not their friends and they often don't feel like they deserve to live. It is not considered manly to ask for help so to deal with all their problems when they come back many of the soldiers turn to alcohol and drugs, and many of them want to go back to the military where they feel like they fit in and everybody knows what they are going through but this only makes the problems bigger. Prolonged exposure therapy is when you make the patient remember what happened and describe it detail. This is done repeatedly so that the person won't associate the memory with as strong feelings as time passes. Another method for recovery is cognitive processing therapy. This is when the patient is taught to separate the event that happened to them from normal life and realize that what they've been through isn't normal.