Transcript
PTSD is a psychiatric problem that happens
to Veterans and non-Veterans who've been exposed
to a very dangerous and potentially life-threatening event.
What happens to you when you have PTSD is that you feel
that you're not the person you were before the traumatic event.
Sometimes you don't even recognize yourself,
and members of your family will say the same thing.
You have a series of symptoms that have changed your life.
You can't stop thinking about what happened to you.
You're trying to listen to someone talking, and you can't
stop thinking about what happened in the war zone,
or when you were raped, or when you had the head-on collision.
Because you have traumatic nightmares
when you go to bed at night, you don't want to go to sleep
because there's a nightmare waiting for you.
When you encounter reminders of the event,
it might be a smell, or a sound, or a sight,
you're emotionally upset.
You might start to sweat, your heart might start to race.
And these reactions are so awful, they're so intolerable
that you'll do almost anything not to experience them.
And this is where we call the avoidance symptoms,
that if you start thinking about the event, you'll try to
distract yourself, you'll try to think about something else.
If you think you might encounter a reminder of the event,
such as the nightly news or something like that,
you won't watch the television.
You won't go in elevators if you were raped in an elevator.
It changes your life because you'll do anything you can
not to be reminded of the event.
It also consists of other symptoms.
You feel differently about yourself.
You feel guilty, or you feel a sense of shame,
or you feel anger as a result of things that happened to you.
You may blame yourself for things.
Your capacity for relationships,
for loving feelings, to have a family are really shut.
You can feel these negative emotions, but you can't feel good
about yourself, you can't feel good about other people.
You don't want to be around other people.
And finally, you're in a state
of extreme arousal most of the time.
You can't think, you can't sleep.
You're crabby and irritable.
You're on guard all the time, watchful to make sure
that something bad isn't going to happen to you again,
and you're very, very jumpy.
The symptoms can persist for months,
and they may last a lifetime if you don't get treatment.