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Stress Reactions May Turn Into PTSD

Everyone watching horrific events - seeing bombings andbloodied and mangled, crying people on TV as well as the Internet - experience trauma. It is normal to have an acute stress reaction, which contains anxiety, hyper-vigilance, greater startle response, grief and horror for the terrible events experienced by the victims as well as their wonder and families about our personal safety and this of our families. These emotions were normal.

People who have experienced trauma in the past or those who are afflicted by existing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression tend to be more at risk of the trauma and might experience exacerbations of the past PTSD or other symptoms.

When people are traumatized, they feel powerless. That powerless feeling may become maladaptive feelings of helplessness that develop into anxiety, panic and depression. Or we become angry to empower ourselves. In order to help, being proactive is adaptive; that is why there was such an outpouring of spontaneous offers of money, memorials and aid - the desire to do something on 9/11 resulted in lines around the block as people tried to donate their own blood.

America is fairly late to the game in getting used to managing the cognitive dissonance of dialectical opposites: wanting ourselves to feel safe yet wanting our freedom and privacy to accomplish what we should want, once we want, and exactly how you want. We cringe at encroachments or discussions on our independence: national identity cards, increased screenings at public places of gathering, profiling - but, we want to feel more secure. We fear totalitarianism but we are voting more monies to create more shades of "1984" than ever before. We are comforted to see the new technologies of face recognition and infrared detection, to have a cooperative citizenry provide the video to help bring the progenitors of these heinous crimes to justice, but at the same time, we realize we are coming under video surveillance "for our own good" by third parties everywhere but in our own homes. As well as in our own others, Google and homes are mining Big Data for patterns of Internet use that reveal information regarding someone user or families.

Having the natural capacity or learning the abilities of perspective, understanding to utilize probability/possibility thinking and making use of reality (quite simply, stating the positive then acknowledging the negative) to avoid catastrophizing all leads to resilience and lessening the percentages of those acute stress reactions turning into PTSD.

Alan Manevitz, M.D. is actually a Psychiatrist in New York, where he maintains a private practice. Dr. Manevitz is a clinical associate professor at Payne Whitney-Weill Cornell Medical Center, an attending psychiatrist at New York Presbyterian and Lennox Hill Hospitals, and teaches on the Weill-Cornell Medical School.

Dr. Manevitz continues to be named between the Top Doctors in the usa by Castle Connolly Medical Ltd., New York City Time’s Super Doctors, Ny Magazine’s Best Psychiatrists in Ny, and greatest Doctors of America.

Psychiatrists New York City