Your brain is equipped with an alarm system that normally helps ensure your survival. With PTSD, this system becomes overly sensitive and triggers easily. In turn, the parts of your brain responsible for thinking and memory stop functioning properly.
According to recent studies, Emotional Trauma and PTSD do cause both brain and physical damage. Neuropathologists have seen overlapping effects of physical and emotional trauma upon the brain.
Brain regions that are felt to play an important role in PTSD include hippocampus, amygdala, and medial prefrontal cortex. Cortisol and norepinephrine are two neurochemical systems that are critical in the stress response (Figure 1.)
Treating PTSD and the Brain
Although with these significant effects of trauma on the brain, fortunately, it is possible to reverse some of the symptoms. These areas of the brain can start functioning better with treatment methods that improve emotional regulation and memory.
For individuals who continually experience traumatic events, or who relive traumatic memories from their childhood as adults, this means the brain can rewire itself in such a way that sometimes causes us to feel overly stressed, even when there's nothing overt to stress about.
Trauma survivors can capitalize on this plasticity to heal. A traumatized brain tends to experience excessive activation in areas related to fear, and reduced activation in "thinking" areas. Psychotherapy and mindfulness training can reduce activation in the fear center and allow for healthy emotional expression.
On a brain scan, a person with PTSD may show a smaller hippocampus, increased amygdala function, or increased cortisol levels in response to stress, according to a report from the Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience.
Although PTSD is considered a mental disorder, the stress that comes with it can lead to physical damage in a patient; and TBI, which is a neurological disorder, can impact thinking, learning, social skills, and communication. It is easy to see how the two conditions can entangle with detrimental effects.
So, does PTSD ever go away? No, but with effective evidence-based treatment, symptoms can be managed well and can remain dormant for years, even decades. But because the trauma that evokes the symptoms will never go away, there is a possibility for those symptoms to be “triggered” again in the future.
The veteran's total disability due to PTSD is permanent with no likelihood of improvement. The 100 percent rating for PTSD is total, permanent, and static in nature.
Researchers from Uppsala University and the medical university Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, found that people with posttraumatic stress disorder have an imbalance between two neurochemical systems in the brain, serotonin, and substance P.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can develop after a very stressful, frightening or distressing event, or after a prolonged traumatic experience. Types of events that can lead to PTSD include: serious accidents. physical or sexual assault.
van der Kolk writes that there are three avenues for recovery: “top down, by talking, (re-) connecting with others, and allowing ourselves to know and understand what is going on with us”; “taking medicines that shut down inappropriate alarm reactions"; and “bottom up, by allowing the body to have experiences that ...
Without treatment, the psychological symptoms of PTSD are likely to worsen over time. Along with severe depression and anxiety, other serious outcomes may include: Increased suicidal ideation. Problems managing anger and aggression.
SMI includes major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder, post traumatic stress (PTSD) and borderline personality disorder (VA).
Physical and behavioral responses include nausea, dizziness, and changes in appetite and sleep pattern as well as withdrawal from daily activities. Responses to trauma can last for weeks to months before people start to feel normal again. Most people report feeling better within three months after a traumatic event.
In some cases, particularly where it is not treated, PTSD can last a very long time, perhaps the remainder of one's life. Most people with longstanding PTSD find that the symptoms are not steady in their severity. For some people, PTSD symptoms gradually fade over time.
Intrusive memories
Recurrent, unwanted distressing memories of the traumatic event. Reliving the traumatic event as if it were happening again (flashbacks) Upsetting dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event. Severe emotional distress or physical reactions to something that reminds you of the traumatic event.
People with brain damage may have balance issues and sensitivity to pain and light. They may have difficulty with communication, including listening and expressing verbally. Brain damage patients may have frequent headaches and extreme mental and physical fatigue.
But one of the most pervasive symptoms of PTSD is not directly related to emotions at all: individuals suffering from a stress-related disorder experience cognitive difficulties ranging from memory loss to an impaired ability to learn new things.
Ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response.
Long-term problems that may develop, or get worse, due to untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, include: Chronic pain. Autoimmune diseases. Depression.
The main treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are psychological therapies and medicine. Traumatic events can be very difficult to come to terms with, but confronting your feelings and seeking professional help is often the only way of effectively treating PTSD.