Please note: this post contains frank references to some of the serious symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress, please refrain from reading if you are sensitive to these issues.
Everyone knows the feeling: the penny drops and suddenly things make sense. That happened recently when I started learning about Post-Traumatic Stress.
Before starting my current job with the BBC I saw a therapist for about a year. We ended the sessions because she only did fixed appointment times and shift work made that impossible.
My therapist didn’t like labels so didn’t generally name conditions — she just dealt with ways to cope. But like my approach to working in IT, I need to know the root cause for problems, so I pressed the issue and she told me I suffered primarily from Post-Traumatic Stress. I took a few psychology courses as electives in when I was an undergraduate, and thought I knew all about PTS – it was what afflicted battle-fatigued solders. She pointed out abuse victims suffer from it as well, possibly more commonly. Women tended to suffer more than men, in fact.
I tucked that info away in my brain. I usually research things to death but I didn’t look into it further this time. I just assumed I understood the condition.
I started to become more cognizant of “triggers” and how serious they were, and to the extent they were responsible for my depression. I used to wonder why depression sometimes just started in a moment, like someone flipped a switch and turned it on. Triggers.
Abuse victims – physical, emotional and sexual — 3-5 times more likely to develop PTSD than those who did not face childhood abuse, depending on which study you read.
A National Institute of Justice (2003) report, based on an analysis of the 1995 National Survey of Adolescents (NSA), found a 4- to 5-fold increase in the lifetime prevalence of PTSD among sexually assaulted boys (28.3%) over that in boys who had not been sexually assaulted (5.4%). The rates in girls were similar, at 29.8% and 7.1%, respectively. The lifetime prevalence of PTSD in girls who were either physically assaulted or received physically abusive punishment compared to those who did not were 27.4% and 6%, respectively, while the rates in boys were 15.2% and 3.1%, respectively.
Source:http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/916007-overview
Recent evidence shows neglect also may be a serious factor in lifetime PTSD. One study found the incidence of PTSD higher in children from care and foster homes than in combat veterans.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_care
Sadly I dealt with both abuse and neglect for most of my childhood so I guess it’s hardly surprising I became afflicted with the illness. A couple of years back the condition was badly exacerbated by a week riddled with disaster – a friend’s untimely passing, my dog getting cancer, losing the support of close friends through both general circumstance and pugnacity. Soon after I lost my job, a victim of severe depression and an utterly un-sympathetic employer. Soon after that my dog passed away. I spent the next 5 months in bed, unable to work and, I’ve come to realise, my condition worsened.
I started thoroughly researching the topic recently, when I found myself suddenly dealing with something that was triggering me. It was something, as best as I can figure, stirred very deep panic and anxiety of the neglect and abandonment. I mentioned it to the person who was triggering me and hoped for a little time to develop a way to de-sensitise but for whatever reason the frequency increased rather than decreased, which of course just caused increasingly intense crises and so on, until suicidal ideation became all-consuming.
I spent the last week or so in a dis-associative daze, if you know me well you’ll know how bad it’s been. When away from work I numb myself as best I can, or take long baths and giving as much attention as humanly possible to whatever is on the radio – anything to stop thinking. When I let myself think my thoughts fell into some deep dark places. They got bad enough that I found myself in the back of ambulance on the way to the local hospital to be assessed. The psychiatric nurse explained the psychiatric ward was probably the worst place to be for someone with depression.
Dis-association describes the phenomenon of feeling your actions are on auto-pilot, you watch your life happening without feeling a part of it or feeling much at all. This phase enables fairly unabashed suicidal ideation. You start to think it would be interesting to watch without the fear that normally prevents it: how much will it hurt? You tend to believe you won’t feel anything at all, just note the experience with bemused indifference until you stop thinking altogether. I can’t really explain it better than that.
I continued reading whatever I could find about the condition. Trawling through google hits I found this article which perfectly explained what I had been experiencing for the last couple of years.
Last night I stumbled over another trigger and had trouble sleeping or coping at all with the anxiety. I struggled badly with the suicidal ideation this morning, but having been prescribed anti-anxiety medicine just for these occasions and not having to work, I medicated, I kept my mind off it by chatting online with online pals and sleeping until it subsided enough to function again. Sadly, this probably describes the holidays of many many people also suffering from the condition; some will even be admonished for “ruining it for everybody else.”
Post-Traumatic Stress falls under the umbrella of anxiety disorders. I knew for a long time the issue doctors called depression failed to consider the anxiety. I remember having one assessment from an NHS psychiatrist where I nearly begged to him find a treatment for the anxiety. He told me he knew best and it was depression that needed treating. I always knew I could manage the depression fairly well as long as the anxiety was kept at bay. Now I understand why, have come a little further in accepting an illness as an illness and not a despicable moral flaw and can try to start building as safe and supportive environment as possible while I get help (much easier said than done, I do realise that).
So the next step is to try to convince my GP to help me find help for the PTS rather than just pharmacological treatment for depression. Also much easier said, than done.