What Is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

2. What is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

A lot of people will be very interested in the types of responses children, adolescents and even some of your teachers and friends/adults will have after these devastating floods. Some people will have heard of something called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder it’s very important to know a little bit about that but also to know that many more things than PTSD will actually, will actually occur. So Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is an anxiety condition, it often can last if it’s not well treated for months, if not years.

It’s key features are 2 fold. One is some sort of re-experiencing phenomena like feeling as if the floods are happening again. You might get night mares, you might get, you know, you might dream about the floods you might suddenly feel as if it’s all going to happen again.

The other key feature is emotional avoidance and numbing so you might feel numb, detached you might spend a lot of your energy forcing it out of your mind, so PTSD is that kind of constellation of symptoms. But there will be many other kinds of presentations some people will simply feel more anxious. Some people will feel more anxious in response phenomena like on a cloudy day or if it starts to rain some people will feel phobically anxious in response to that. Some people will have increasing depressive symptoms like; lowered mood, loss of interest, loss of energy, sleep disorder - either problems getting to sleep or waking up early or a feeling kind of a degree of agitation.

In fact, after disasters the whole gamut of emotional symptoms can be seen. There will be people that will be angry and that will be the way that they show their emotional distress. And sometimes people get regressed, they act like they were much, much younger a child could start sucking their thumb again or wet their bed or be clingy to their parent after disasters I’ve even seen parents talk in a baby like voice. So the slowly confusing thing and we’ll be giving lots of facts sheets and tip sheets for people to work this out is there’s lots of different presentations after a natural disaster.