Chastity385

Stress Reactions May Turn Into PTSD

Everyone watching horrific events - seeing bombings andbloodied and mangled, crying people in the media and also the Internet - experience trauma. It is normal to get an acute stress reaction, which contains anxiety, hyper-vigilance, greater startle response, horror and grief for the terrible events felt by the victims along with their families and wonder about our personal safety and this in our families. These emotions were normal.

Those who have experienced trauma previously or people who suffer from existing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety are more susceptible to the trauma and might experience exacerbations with their past PTSD or other symptoms.

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

The United States is fairly late for the game in getting used to coping with the cognitive dissonance of dialectical opposites: wanting ourselves to feel safe yet wanting our privacy and freedom to perform what we should want, whenever we want, and exactly how we 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. 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, even though 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. And even in our personal others, Google and homes are mining Big Data for patterns of Internet use that reveal information regarding a person user or families.

Obtaining the natural capacity or learning the relevant skills of perspective, understanding to make use of probability/possibility thinking and using reality (quite simply, stating the positive and then acknowledging the negative) to avoid catastrophizing all leads to resilience and lessening the percentages of these acute stress reactions turning into PTSD.

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

Dr. Manevitz has become named among the Top Doctors in the usa by Castle Connolly Medical Ltd., New York Time’s Super Doctors, Ny Magazine’s Best Psychiatrists in New York, and Best Doctors of America.

Psychiatrist NYC