Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

The essential theme involved in PTSD is the formation of symptoms following exposure to an extreme and traumatic stressor.  This stressor involves personal experience of actual or threatened death, injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity; witnessing such an event; or learning about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury to a family member or close associate.

The characteristic symptoms that present may include but are not limited to:
 

  • recurrent distressing thoughts or dreams
  • sense of reliving the experience
  • intense psychological distress
  • physiological reactivity
  • efforts to avoid things that arouse memory
  • feeling of detachment
  • irritability
  • decreased concentration
  • hypervigilance
  • sleep disruption