Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

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Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Introduction

Traumatic events involve actual or threatened death or injury or a threat to an individual's physical integrity. Traumatic events can include events that one actually experienced or events that one witnessed. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) consists of three clusters of interrelated symptoms: re-experiencing, avoidance/numbing, and hyperarousal. These symptoms develop after an individual experiences a traumatic event. Throughout the history of war, combat stress has been defined in many ways. By the end of World War I, the effects of combat stress were beginning to be recognized. The term used was shell shock or war neurosis (Eisenberg, 1996, 14). The soldiers who had signs of shell shock we re thought to have a mild brain injury.

After World War I, the effect of combat stress changed to combat fatigue during World War II, and then finally, with the research that has been done on Vietnam War veterans, the term posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was termed to encompass the impact of combat stress. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown high rates of combat stress. Researchers have estimated that 6% to 11% of soldiers who returned from Afghanistan and 12% to 15% of soldiers who returned from Iraq screened positive for PTSD. These numbers can be compared to a 5% rate of pre-deployment PTSD in one study of active duty, mostly junior enlisted soldiers (Degnan, 2010, 49). This prevalence has been shown to increase over the first 2 years after the soldiers' return from deployment.

In 2007, researchers found that those who screened positive for PTSD had more missed work days and reported twice as many somatic symptoms as did those who screened negative for PTSD 1 year after deployment. These individuals were also at a higher risk for alcohol-related problems and depression. This may not be surprising when considering that in a study of over 300,000 soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, of the 21,000 who screened positive for PTSD, 79.6% of those soldiers reported witnessing individuals being wounded or killed or engaging in direct combat during which they discharged their weapons. Research has shown that those with combat exposure are up to 17 times more likely to meet criteria for PTSD.

The diagnostic criteria for PTSD include: the presence of a traumatic event, persistently re-experienced, avoidance of triggers associated with the trauma, persistent symptoms of increased arousal not present before the trauma, and disturbance lasting more than one month, and the disturbance causes significant distress or impairment in functioning. The majority of individuals diagnosed with PTSD have been found to have a co-occurring diagnosis as well, such as depression or anxiety. Due to this comorbidity factor and also that it may be too early to assess the complete effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number of soldiers diagnosed with PTSD may be underestimated.

Military Clients Suffering From PTSD

Psychological Debriefing (PD) is an early intervention, used in the treatment of PTSD in order to prevent the onset of PTSD (Bisson, ...