PTSD - More Common Than You Think

You may think that PTSD only happens to victims of war, rape, deliberate psychological abuse and things like that. You might think that PTSD only happens in soldiers, abused people, and people who have experienced severe accidents like plane crashes, automobile accidents and things like this.

You couldn't be more wrong!

Though the types of events mentioned above do contribute to causing PTSD and the types of people above often develop PTSD, there are a lot more details to the condition of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that need to be considered.

A person considered more 'emotionally sensitive' than those around him/her may experience certain events as 'traumatic,' whereas peers do not. In a sense, a main 'requirement' for developing PTSD is pretty simple:

If a person's response to an event or situation involves intense fear, feelings of helplessness, or horror...

This can lead to PTSD symptoms where the affected person might:

* Have recurrent recollections of the experience (thoughts, feelings, 'impressions' and perceptions)
* Have nightmares
* Feel, at times, as though the event is happening again (reliving the experience)
* Be triggered by visual, audio or any kind of 'cues' associated with even a small part of the event - and react severely to these triggers while experiencing intense psychological distress (panic, fear, despair, hopelessness, anger, etc)

There are more symptoms, but these are some basic ones.

Children often experience these symptoms if they have been exposed to violent videos at too young an age, before their 'life experience,' emotional and mental capabilities are able to sort out 'reality' from 'fantasy.' In certain cases, it would be correct to determine a child as suffering from PTSD - if they are having recurring nightmares, are having trouble determining that the experience is 'over' and instead, are 'reliving' the memory over and over again - if they feel intense fear, hopelessness, are feeling 'horrified' by whatever they have seen.

On a different note, it is possible that PTSD can also circulate on a mass level and reach people who do not actually experience DIRECT contact with a traumatic event. And example of this is how people reacted, internationally, to 9/11 with horror, fear, and hopelessness.

Do you think that there are still residual PTSD sufferers from 9/11 who weren't even in New York during the disaster?