PTSD Awareness Day: What You Need to Know

Today is PTSD Awareness Day.

In a world where traumas are all too common — from natural disasters to combat and mass shootings as well as sexual assault and intimate partner violence — here are a few things to know about PTSD.

What Is PTSD?

PTSD is short for posttraumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that appears in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

PTSD became part of the DSM in 1980. However, PTSD wasn’t new or unique to the 20^th century. Rather, the combination of reactions to trauma that make up the contemporary PTSD diagnosis has gone by different names over the centuries: hysteria, soldier’s heart, railway spine, traumatic neuroses.

While the definition of PTSD in the DSM has evolved over time, the diagnosis currently includes four groups of symptoms. The first group is called re-experiencing symptoms, which feels like reliving the trauma, such as through flashbacks or nightmares. Second, avoidance symptoms involve avoiding reminders of the trauma whether people or situations. The third set of symptoms is made up of a mix of negative thoughts and feelings that can range from feeling numb and not remembering parts of the trauma to feeling distrustful of others or guilty and ashamed. The fourth set of symptoms involves hypervigilance, which can feel like being very on edge, jumpy, or keyed up.

A unique feature of PTSD, relative to other DSM diagnoses, is that the symptoms are a reaction to an event — in particular, a traumatic stressor.

What Kinds of Traumatic Stress Can Lead to PTSD?

The word “trauma” can be used in everyday conversations to refer to a host of different kinds of experiences. The DSM, however, defines the kinds of traumatic stressors that can lead to a PTSD diagnosis in terms of experiencing or witnessing life-threatening events, or events that threaten one’s physical integrity, such as sexual violence. The DSM also includes learning that these kinds of events happened to loved ones in its definition of traumatic stressors.

How Common Is PTSD?

In the aftermath of traumatic stress, it’s quite common for people to experience reactions that sound a lot like the symptoms that make up the PTSD diagnosis. For example, people might have intrusive thoughts about the trauma or nightmares, feel jumpy, or want to avoid people or situations.

For most people, those initial reactions will go away over time. The DSM recognizes how common these reactions are by saying that PTSD shouldn’t be diagnosed until the symptoms have been around for at least a month.

Researchers estimate that about 6 out of every 100 adults in the U.S. will meet all the criteria for PTSD at some point in their lives.

What Treatments Are Available?

There are many treatments available for PTSD. For example, cognitive processing therapy focuses on helping people understand the impact that trauma can have on their thoughts and feelings, and strategies for handling those thoughts and feelings. A recent meta-analysis of 11 studies with more than 1,000 participants showed that CPT is effective in addressing PTSD. In 2019, an episode of This American Life brought CPT to life in a story that followed a writer’s own journey through the intervention.

Beyond PTSD

It’s important to bring awareness to PTSD. It’s also important to recognize that traumatic stress is linked to a host of reactions beyond PTSD. For example, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, dissociation, and physical health problems have all been linked with traumatic stress, particularly interpersonal trauma, such as child abuse, sexual assault, and relationship abuse.

So what do we do about a world in which PTSD and other trauma-related reactions are common? Research points to the importance of getting information and resources to survivors so that they can make decisions along the path to healing.

We also share an interest in working together to prevent interpersonal traumas from happening in the first place.