Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
PTSD can be caused by trauma that occurred too fast, too many times, or was too intense for the mind to process it. Individuals with PTSD experience major disruptions to their body’s functioning, mood, sleep, ability to work, and relationships. EMDR, offered here at MSPWC, has significant efficacy in treating PTSD.
What is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)?
PTSD is a disorder experienced by individuals who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event. Traumatic events can be sexual violence, motor vehicle accidents, serious injury, war, and similar events. Traumatic events can also be anything that is too much or happens too fast for the mind to process.
Approximately 9.2% of Canadians experience PTSD in their lifetimes. PTSD affects all ethnicities, nationalities, ages, and cultures similarly. A defining feature of PTSD is having intense, intrusive, and disturbing thoughts along with flashbacks and nightmares about a traumatic event long after the event happened. This leads people to try and avoid these feelings and flashbacks at any cost.
PTSD can strongly affect a person’s functioning, relationships, and ability to cope.
Approximately 9.2% of Canadians experience PTSD in their lifetimes. PTSD affects all ethnicities, nationalities, ages, and cultures similarly. A defining feature of PTSD is having intense, intrusive, and disturbing thoughts along with flashbacks and nightmares about a traumatic event long after the event happened. This leads people to try and avoid these feelings and flashbacks at any cost.
PTSD can strongly affect a person’s functioning, relationships, and ability to cope.
What are some common symptoms of PTSD?
- Intrusive thoughts such as distressing dreams and flashbacks
- Avoidance: feeling like you're trying to avoid any situations or triggers that might remind you of the traumatic event
- Change in cognition or mood: Increased fear, horror, anger, guilt, shame along with change in perception about self and others.
- Change in reactivity: Experiencing more irritability, experiencing angry outburst, behaving recklessly, becoming hyper-aware of one’s surroundings.
What are some treatment options for PTSD?
One of the most common types of treatment for PTSD is psychotherapy. There are many different types of psychotherapies which focus on areas such as identifying triggers and responses, processing trauma, and learning new ways to cope and manage our trauma responses.
Research shows that EMDR is particularly useful for treating trauma and PTSD. For information on the types of psychotherapies MSPWC offers, please visit the interventions tab.
Research shows that EMDR is particularly useful for treating trauma and PTSD. For information on the types of psychotherapies MSPWC offers, please visit the interventions tab.
