Dispelling the nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder

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avoidance, behaviour, cbt, distress, Ehlers and Clark, flashback, hyperarousal, interpretations, low mood, Memory, negative thoughts, nightmares, post traumatic stress disorder, psychological effects, psychotherapy, PTSD, reliving, reminders, symptoms, threat, trauma, trauma memories, traumatic event, treatment, triggers

Dispelling the nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder

On Wednesday morning we woke to the news that a passenger ferry had sunk off the coast of South Korea, with at least four people confirmed dead and 280 unaccounted for. Meanwhile, though the search has continued for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, relatives’ hopes of a safe landing have long since been extinguished.

Human tragedies like these are the stuff of daily news, but we rarely hear about the long-term psychological effects on survivors and the bereaved, who may experience the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder for years after their experience.

Although most people have heard of PTSD, few will have a clear idea of what it entails. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) defines a traumatic event as one in which a person “experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others”. PTSD is marked by four types of responses to the trauma. First, patients repeatedly relive the event, either in the form of nightmares or flashbacks. Second, they seek to avoid any reminder of the traumatic event. Third, they feel constantly on edge. Fourth, they are plagued with negative thoughts and low mood.

According to one estimate, almost 8% of people will develop PTSD during their lifetime. Clearly trauma (and PTSD) can strike anyone, but the risks of developing the condition are not equally distributed. Rates are higher in socially disadvantaged areas, for instance. Women may be twice as likely to develop PTSD as men. This is partly because women are at greater risk of the kinds of trauma that commonly produce PTSD (rape, for example). Nevertheless – and for unknown reasons – when exposed to the same type of trauma, women are more susceptible to PTSD than men.

What causes it? In one sense, the answer is obvious: a specific trauma. Yet this is only part of the story, because not everyone who is raped or badly beaten up develops PTSD. Of the contemporary psychological attempts to answer that question, the most influential is the one formulated by the clinical psychologists Anke Ehlers and David Clark at the University of Oxford.

They argue that PTSD develops when the person believes they are still seriously threatened by the trauma they have experienced. Why should someone assume they are still endangered by an event that happened months or even years previously? Ehlers and Clark identify two factors.

First is a negative interpretation of the trauma and the normal feelings that follow, for example believing that “nowhere is safe”, “I attract disaster”, or “I can’t cope with stress”. These interpretations can make the person feel in danger physically (the world seems unsafe), or psychologically (their self-confidence and sense of well-being feel irreparably damaged).

Second are problems with the memory of the trauma. Partly because of the way the person experiences the event, the memory somehow fails to acquire a properly developed context and meaning. As a result, it constantly intrudes. Ehlers and Clark liken the traumatic memory to “a cupboard in which many things have been thrown in quickly and in a disorganised fashion, so it is impossible to fully close the door and things fall out at unpredictable times”.

These factors change the way people behave. They may avoid situations that might spark a memory of the trauma, and will sometimes try to deaden their feelings with drink or drugs. Yet these strategies tend to entrench and exacerbate the problem.

PTSD can be treated with antidepressants or various kinds of psychotherapy, including prolonged exposure therapy and eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. However, a recent meta-analysis of 112 studies conducted over the past 30 years found that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) was the single most successful type of treatment.

CBT typically comprises three main strands. First, it evaluates the individual’s excessively negative thoughts about the trauma and its aftermath – for example by helping them understand that they are not to blame or that their feelings are normal and natural. Second, the treatment works on the person’s memory of the trauma: the individual might be asked to write a detailed account of the event; relive it in their imagination; revisit the site of the trauma; or be shown how to cope with the kind of objects or situations that trigger the traumatic memory.

The final strand involves tackling the kind of behaviours that tend to fuel PTSD, for example by demonstrating that attempting to suppress a thought is futile (if you doubt it, try right now not to think of a white bear) or that avoiding a situation only strengthens one’s fear.

A course of CBT for PTSD normally involves meeting with a therapist once or twice a week over several months. Given how debilitating the problem can be, that can seem like a very long time to wait to get one’s life back on track. However, pioneering research published in last month’s issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that there may be an alternative. Instead of months, it may be possible to tackle the symptoms of PTSD in just seven days.

Anke Ehlers at the University of Oxford and her colleagues randomly assigned 121 patients with PTSD (about 60% female, 40% male) either to a seven-day course of intensive CBT; weekly sessions of CBT for three months; a type of psychotherapy known as emotion-focused supportive counselling; or to a 14-week waiting list. Participants in the first three groups all received the same amount of therapy (18 hours).

The results were striking. The intensive CBT proved almost as successful as the standard three-month course, with respective recovery rates from PTSD of 73% and 77%, and the intensive version produced its effects more quickly. For the supportive counselling group, recovery was 43% (another finding that undermines the idea that all types of psychotherapy are equally effective). Among the waiting list group, just 7% had recovered. Both courses of CBT also led to large reductions in levels of anxiety and depression.

Most importantly, the benefits lasted: 40 weeks after entering the study, about two-thirds of the CBT patients were still free from the symptoms of PTSD. The therapy isn’t easy – it confronts highly distressing events and feelings, after all – but it works.

Follow @ProfDFreeman and @JasonFreeman100 on Twitter

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Malnutrition in conflict: the psychological cause

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Children, conflict, despair, displaced, flashback, hopelessness, hypervigilant, infanticide, irritability, isolation, malnutrition, natural disasters, parents, post-traumatic stress, psychological support, recovery, signs, suicide, trauma, violence

Malnutrition in conflict: the psychological cause

Treating malnutrition in humanitarian crises, such as conflict and natural disaster, is far more complex than simply curing disease and providing children with therapeutic foods. Often, post-traumatic stress disorder – common in extreme situations – hinders treatment and its success. In Bangui, in the Central African Republic (CAR), the number of children suffering from life-threatening malnutrition has tripled since the outbreak of violence in December 2013.

Each month, 180 patients are being seen in a ward that initially had just 49 beds available for malnourished children. For many weeks, two to three patients – and their caregivers – were sharing single beds, increasing the risk of cross-infection of illness and delaying recovery.

The cause of severe acute malnutrition runs far beyond economic hardship and lack of food. Many of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by fighting have been directly exposed to death threats, witnessed the deaths of neighbours or family members, and lost nearly all of their belongings. They are often exhausted by the harsh living conditions in camps.

75% of over 1,000 case studies of the parents of malnourished children collected by Action Against Hunger between July 2013 and March 2014 presented symptoms of post-traumatic stress linked to their exposure to extreme violence. The stress prompted behavioural changes, flashbacks, fatigue, isolation, excessive irritability, and feelings of hopelessness and despair.

These experiences also provoked reactions that – while understandable, normal, and usually temporary – can be disabling enough to impact a mother’s ability to nurse and feed her child. Nurses leading pre- and post-natal sessions with women in the 12 health centres around Bangui have reported that some mothers become convinced they cannot produce milk, or fail to respond to their child’s needs, resulting in early weaning that can be fatal for babies in an already challenging environment. In extreme cases, some mothers have attempted suicide and infanticide.

Children, while too young to fully understand what they have witnessed, may develop physical symptoms such as continuous crying, refusing to eat and bed wetting. Even small babies can present signs of trauma, such as feeding and sleep disturbances, continuous crying, and poor interaction. Not recognising the signs, some parents don’t make the connection and severely scold their children. To combat this, malnourished children and their carers are receiving psychological and social support.

At the nutritional therapeutic ward of Bangui’s main pediatric hospital, Action Against Hunger’s nutritional, psychological and social teams offer free treatment for severely malnourished children from a specialised counselling team. Feeding times, medical monitoring and psychological and motor activities pace the daily routine.

When Dieumerci Tsongbele, a single parent to his six-year-old daughter Jessica, arrived at the hospital, she had been refusing food and was not interacting with others. When he joined a welcoming session led by psychological and social experts, Tsongbele and other parents learned about factors that exacerbate malnutrition, including trauma. The information evoked an emotional response from the father, who had witnessed people killed. While he managed to escape the violence, the experience had left him unable to sleep, irritable and hypervigilant. Overwhelmed by the situation, he admitted he had been less attentive to his daughter’s needs.

During the programme, Tsongbele and the other parents participated in various activities with their children ranging from toy making to baby massage, which aim to provide both parents and children with a safe space to recreate natural and vital bonds that are essential for human development. Play sessions help to limit the negative effects of malnutrition strengthen parent-child relationships. Malnutrition treatment is not simply about filling stomachs, but also restoring the desire to eat.

Names have been changed to protect identities.

Stephanie Duvergé is a Action Against Hunger psychologist in the Central African Republic. Follow @ACF_UK on Twitter.

PTSD: The pain of reliving trauma years after the event

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anxiety, Depression, dissociation, flashback, Memory, PTSD, rape, Refugees, reliving, sexual abuse, stress, Therapy, Torture, trauma, war

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/03/29/ptsd-the-pain-of-reliving-trauma-years-after-the-event/

One of my first experiences of PTSD came as a psychologist working with African and Kurdish refugees.

Many had fled oppressive regimes and been referred to our service by their GP suffering severe anxiety, depression and stress. We discovered the root of the problem often lay in terrible personal experiences including rape, torture and witnessing the murder of loved ones.

These mental scars have a long and insidious reach in the shape of PTSD whose victims can repeatedly relive a traumatic event years after the original incident took place.

I remember my shock the first time I worked with a woman who, as she described what had happened to her, lost all sense of where she was. She verbally and physically tried to fend off an imaginary attacker as well as crying and shaking with fear as part of her episodic ‘flashbacks.’

The problem can be complicated by people having great feelings of shame and guilt about what happened as if they were somehow to blame. PTSD’s victims can also include perpetrators of violence who, on reflection, feel enormous regret for their actions.

Soldiers are the most high profile casualties of PTSD but it is even more prevalent among the civilian population.

It can affect anyone involved in a near death experience and includes ‘single incident’ traumas, such as a car crash, earthquake or tsunami.

The recent sinking of an Italian passenger ship that made headline news is another example as were the terrorist bombings on London’s transport network.

It’s important to recognise that PTSD symptoms are a perfectly normal part of the healing process when they occur immediately after a trauma. Our mind is often too pre-occupied with survival to process what happened at the time so revisits the experience helping us make sense and gain perspective on what happened. In the normal process of producing memories the mind knits the various strands of an experience together based on our senses, such as sight, sound, touch and taste as well as other aspects of what we were experiencing at that time.

It also puts a ‘date stamp’ on the memory so we know when and where something has happened. When a trauma is occurring the mind is using all of its energy to keep us alive so memories often don’t get properly formed.

In the hours, days and weeks following the trauma bits of the semi-formed memory will ‘pop’ into consciousness. This can be upsetting but gives the mind the opportunity to link the various fragments together to form a normal memory.

In cases of PTSD, the healing process effectively gets stuck and, like a scratched CD, the mind repeatedly replays the trauma.

This produces a vicious circle in which the distress generated by the memories continues to stop the brain’s ability to process the memories to a level that they cause less discomfort. As a result, patients find themselves vividly reliving the experience over and over with the same intense feeling of fear they experienced during the original incident. These ‘flashbacks’ can be triggered by something that the victim associates with the original trauma, such as a sound, colour or smell.

Sensory triggers can create powerful positive and negative anchors in our minds. You could be having a bad day at work when an old friend rings and your mood switches in an instant because the sound of their voice triggers a past association of feeling good. Likewise, hearing a favourite song on the radio often makes you feel better because you associate it with a previous experience of wellbeing.

This is also true of traumatic experiences, particularly when the ‘date stamp’ has not been associated with the memory so rather than being reminded of the events it can feel exactly as if they are happening again.

A refugee suffering PTSD may link the sound of footsteps echoing down a corridor with those of events years before when their protagonist came to torture them. The smell of burning rubber and smoke may bring back the experience of watching the family home burnt to the ground by soldiers or a family member killed in front of you.

PTSD creates a vicious circle in which the distress caused by the partially formed memories stops the brain from processing them to a level where they are less intrusive. This round-robin can lead to a number of associated conditions including anxiety, depression and stress as well as ‘avoidance’ where someone will increasingly isolate themselves to avoid triggering a flashback.

Flashbacks or vividly ‘re-living’ aspects of past events are one upsetting response to trauma. Another is ‘disassociation’ where the victim’s mind psychologically removes them from an experience. This can be emotionally protective at the time but if this dissociation happens when memories of the trauma are triggered it can be hugely upsetting and disruptive to normal day-to-day life. People experiencing this can often ‘lose’ pieces of time from their day and have no recollection of what happened to them unless someone tells them.

In our clinical work we tend to see this type of response in people who have gone through repeated trauma as a child, such as prolonged periods of sexual or physical abuse.

You can imagine that to ‘remove’ themselves mentally may be the only way that a child is able to escape what is being done to them. It serves to protect the child when nothing else can but also leads to problems later in life.

Medication can help reduce stress in some patients but the main treatment for PTSD is a ‘talking therapy’ in which the patient works with the therapist to help their mind find a way process the bits of trauma memory in a more complete way.

A number of question marks remain. Why are some of us more resilient to the effects of PTSD than others? And what role do the corrosive effects of guilt, grief and shame have on recovery?

It is an often distressing area to work in as a therapist but also incredibly rewarding in helping patients first understand what is happening to them and then interrupt the cycle of PTSD symptoms.

It is, for some, the start of the long journey back to more ‘normal’ day-to-day life helping them regain control over aspects of their lives they thought they may have had lost forever.