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My blog: PTSD is a Family Injury

PTSD is a family injury. It is not something just one person in the family goes through. Everything has ripple effects and when one person “changes” in a family unit, it changes the whole family. Sometimes this is the first sign that PTSD has hit your household. Sometimes seeing the behavioral changes in your children are the first signs that people will admit there’s a problem. It’s one thing if I am suffering; I am a doctor, Veteran, first responder, therapist, nurse, etc; I can handle it and I know I may see and hear things that will affect me. But I don’t want my children suffering. I don’t want other people to be hurting, especially if I can do something about it. So when people notice the behavioral changes in their children, often this gives them the kick start they need to get into therapy and start working on themselves.

What if you could prevent your children from regressing to bedwetting, temper tantrums, and the like? What if you could prevent your children from angry outbursts or not wanting to leave your side (separation anxiety)? What if you could prevent you and your significant other from arguing over stupid little things that shouldn’t matter? What if you could prevent PTSD from becoming a family illness? What would that mean to you? Would you keep your family together? Continue to have passion for your job? Continue to do the activities you enjoy? Teach your family how to release tension in a safe, appropriate and healthy manner, thus raising healthy and well-adjusted children? Ask yourself is it worth this internal war that even if it is only internal now, will not be able to stay internal forever? Is it worth my life and my family’s life to go on this way?

Events that we go through day to day will have an impact on us. No matter how small the event is. So when your day consists of witnessing traumas (whether in person or by listening to other recount the traumas), it will have a significant impact on you. This is normal. It is ok. You are not sick or crazy or weak or incapable. You are normal. Your reactions, your emotional state of being, your numbness, crying episodes, nightmares, superimposing your family onto the situations you’ve witnessed, anger, all of this is normal. What makes you the strong one is you are learning about PTSD, what its symptoms are, why you’re having these symptoms, and learning that PTSD is not a weakness. This information is the beginning to understanding what to do about this debilitating (and not necessarily permanent) brain injury. Once a cluster of symptoms is known and has a name, it is no longer as scary and one can start fighting back.

Just last week I spoke with a firefighter who was diagnosed with PTSD 17 years ago. He is an amazing human being and has come so far in his recovery. However, one thing stood out to me tremendously. He said “Here I am, America’s greatest, and I’m curled up on the floor crying like a baby.” If only he had understood so many years prior to being diagnosed what was happening in his brain, how much of his suffering could have been avoided? Getting the word out there, breaking down the stigmas that “America’s greatest” will not have lasting effects, and increasing awareness that they are human beings like everyone else could prevent PTSD from ravaging their households, and keep them strong leaders in our country, in your state, in your city or town, in your neighborhood.

June is PTSD awareness month. Today is the last day of the month. My blogs this month have had to do with raising awareness about PTSD. This campaign should not stop just because we are at the end of national PTSD awareness month. What are you willing to do to continue raising awareness that PTSD is a brain injury, not a “disorder” and your symptoms are normal to the events you are dealing with on a daily basis? Comment below or send me an email. I’d love to hear your responses! .

More Important News

AUSTIN (KXAN) — After years of using the method to treat city officers, the Austin Police Department’s staff psychologist is kicking off a new study to show the effectiveness of a specific type of trauma treatment on law enforcement professionals.

The study is being funded by a $38,000 grant from the city’s Office of Innovation and will test the treatment method on 911 call-takers and police dispatchers.

The treatment, called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, has been around since the late 1980s; Dr. Carol Logan has used the protocol with Austin officers since she started with the department in 2003.

In an interview with KXAN, Logan described EMDR as a way to help those suffering from post-traumatic stress reprocess traumatic memories in a way that allows them to deal with the thoughts in a healthy way.

“The analogy would be like a carpenter who’s using a hammer and a screwdriver who all of a sudden gets power tools,” Logan said.

Traumatic memories are stored in the brain differently from normal memories, Logan said, bundled with all the emotion, images and sounds that happen in the moment the trauma takes place. When something triggers that memory, “you get everything all at once and it feels like it’s happening now.”

EMDR helps patients reprocess those memories so they’re stored more normally and can be accessed without recalling the trauma itself, Logan said.

“We are traumatizing them as the city of Austin in asking them to be our guardians,” Logan said, “so it’s the least we can do to help clean that out of their brain.”

EMDR asks patients to talk about the traumatic memory, at which point the therapist starts employing some kind of bilateral stimulation — basically anything that you can sense going back and forth.

Logan uses a wand for her patients to follow with her eyes, but other psychologists motion with their hands, tap their patients’ knees back and forth, or ask the subjects to hold paddles that vibrate one at a time. The alternating sides allows the brain to engage with and reprocess trauma memories, Logan said, allowing them to be stored like normal ones.

The EMDR study, which will collect data through the summer, will include 60 call-takers and dispatchers. Those professionals, Logan said, often deal with trauma from responding to people in crisis, but are often overlooked.

Kathy Yarbrough knows that all too well. “I did have an officer killed,” she remembered. “June 2, 1995, 7:00 in the evening. He was hit by a drunk driver.”

Yarbrough has been a dispatcher for three decades, with the last 23 years dispatching for APD. She said she felt responsible for the officer’s death, since she was the one who sent that officer on the call.

“And it took months to not have nightmares,” she said, “because all you could hear was the other officer screaming.”

Logan believes the treatment can help people like Yarbrough, though the study is not to the point yet where subjects have been identified.Half of the 60 will receive EMDR and the other half will receive stress management treatment, the most common method currently being used to treat post-traumatic stress. The results, the psychologist hopes, will help win more grants to expand the study to include officers.

The study, she believes, can help create a program for other departments to implement treatment plans similar to the one she’s used successfully with APD officers.