The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is not only taking its toll physically. It’s also having a heavy impact on people’s mental state. Many people are forced to live with PTSD because of the pandemic.
In fact, the stress has gotten to a point in which actress Mayim Bialik, of Beaches, Blossom, and The Big Bang Theory fame, who’s currently busy with a new sitcom, Call Me Kat, felt compelled to use her Ph.D. in neuroscience to launch Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown.
It’s a weekly mental-health podcast with an accompanying website. Here she debunks the myths and misconceptions around mental health to help heighten people’s understanding.
As she recently told Parade magazine, “I noticed during the quarantine that people who already had mental health struggles were struggling more, and people who never had them were starting to struggle.”
So imagine what this time is like for people who live with PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder.
To understand if you’re experiencing PTSD, or to recognize it in others, we’ll define this condition and it’s triggers.
Who Suffers from PTSD and Why
What exactly is PTSD? It’s a psychiatric disorder that can manifest in people who have either:
- Experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, a serious accident, a terrorist act, combat, or rape
- Been threatened with sexual violence, serious injury, or death
The term is most well known regarding combat veterans, with the name evolving from “shell shock” during World War I and then “combat fatigue” after World War II. PTSD and preventing suicide are key.
But PTSD cuts across ethnicity, nationality, culture, occupation, and age.
On the most basic level, if you have experienced a potential threat to your life, you could develop PTSD.
PTSD is a biological injury. Brain imaging, using MRI technology, can identify changes in neurochemical systems and specific brain regions, or circuits connecting them, involved in the stress response.
With PTSD, the sympathetic nervous system becomes overactive. This system is what helps us respond to a threat, elevating our heart rate and our breathing, creating the “fight-or-flight” response to better protect us from harm.
PTSD can put sufferers in that fight-or-flight response full time. This makes them feel constantly on guard and prone to exaggerated responses.
Most people don’t develop PTSD from a trauma. Many experience PTSD-like symptoms, but they usually resolve within a month, especially if they have the proper emotional support. The diagnostic definition of PTSD requires symptoms to persist longer than 30 days, and must cause significant distress or problems in the person’s daily functioning.
Symptoms of PTSD
For people who live with PTSD, the shock, anger, nervousness, fear, and even guilt they experienced from the trauma linger and sometimes intensify, resulting in the following behaviors that can begin as early as three months after the event or as prolonged as years later.
- Flashbacks
- Hallucinations
- Nightmares
- Detachment
- Isolation
- Excessive emotion, be it anger or affection
- Difficulty falling or staying asleep
- Irritability
- Difficulty concentrating
- Easily startled
- Increased blood pressure and heart rate
- Nervous sweating
- Rapid breathing
- Muscle tension
- Nausea
- Diarrhea
- Negative thoughts, including suicidal thoughts
- Intense fear
Signs of PTSD in Children and Teens
Children who have been through trauma will have trouble sleeping and concentrating and may experience fidgeting, flashbacks, nightmares, irritability, and frequent crying.
Teens who live with PTSD will also have trouble sleeping. They can also excessively drink alcohol, self-harm, use drugs, and show reckless dating, partying, and extreme impulsivity. And if left untreated, they can also end up in dysfunctional romantic relationships as adults with major trust issues.
Triggers of PTSD
Post-traumatic stress disorder triggers include loud noises or other situations that the sufferer perceives as potentially turning dangerous. These include being in a crowd or somewhere that’s similar to the original traumatic event.
Unfortunately, what can trigger PTSD is subjective and varies by individual.
There are obvious triggers such as seeing a news report of an assault or the anniversary of a traumatic event. But even sights, smells, sounds, or thoughts that remind someone of the traumatic event can be a trigger, including something as seemingly innocent as a bright blue sky — if you were attacked on a sunny day, this could make you upset.
Ways of Dealing with PTSD
While there is no cure for PTSD, with proper treatment, people can see a complete resolution of symptoms, or at least significant improvements and a much better quality of life.
Here are methods that can help.
Therapies to Help with PTSD
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is effective for treating people who live with PTSD. It centers on helping you recognize negative or unhelpful thoughts and behavior patterns and then learning how to reframe your thoughts in a more positive and helpful way.
If you want to explore more than conventional counseling to benefit from additional treatment options, then seek help from trauma treatment specialists.
For example, there is counseling in Southeastern Connecticut featuring this specialty. Wisdom Within Counseling’s PTSD therapy gives you a toolbox of techniques added on to talk therapy, from exercise, yoga, sleep, and nutrition to food, art therapy, and meditation.
With this type of PTSD therapy, you’ll receive holistic, creative care to effectively heal, recover, rebuild your self-worth, and empower yourself.
Holistic therapy is not used solely for PTSD therapy. If you find during your trauma therapy that it would help to work through other issues, the types of therapy can extend to marriage counseling in Mystic, Connecticut, or anxiety counseling In East Lyme, Ct.
Therapies for Children and Teens with PTSD
The best therapy for PTSD in children is holistic, creative treatment that includes mind, body, and spirit connection. Mind-body relaxation techniques, including yoga, art, music, animals, and outdoor therapies, help children feel safe, secure, and trust in their therapist to help them heal from trauma.
The therapeutic focus for teens is to teach them positive coping skills to help promote self-esteem growth.
Medications to Help with PTSD
Another PTSD treatment is psychopharmacology, in which patients are treated with medication alone or in conjunction with therapy.
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), the medications for PTSD that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are sertraline (Zoloft) and paroxetine (Paxil). But fluoxetine (Prozac) and venlafaxine (Effexor) are also used.
Other Methods to Alleviate PTSD
Many people are using prescribed medical marijuana or are self-medicating with marijuana to alleviate their PTSD symptoms. According to a study led by Carrie Cuttler, a Washington State University assistant professor of psychology, people suffering from PTSD report cannabis reduces the severity of their symptoms by more than half.
There are a few downsides to this. For one, marijuana is still not legal in all states, so you could be breaking the law. And the effect is only temporary.
A new option is a stellate ganglion block (SGB). It’s an injection of a local anesthetic on either side of the voice box in the neck, which blocks the sympathetic nerves to reduce PTSD symptoms such as pain, swelling, coloring, and sweating.
Therapy is still the primary treatment. But the choice of treatment should be based on the best scientific evidence, comfort with the options, and consultation with a physician, psychologist, or mental health professional.
We hope we’ve raised your awareness about post-traumatic stress disorder, to shed some stigmas and to recognize its symptoms, in order to help yourself or others who may be suffering from this condition move into recovery mode.
