PTSD

People everywhere are suffering from PTSD, and it isn’t only people who have served in the military. Men, women, and children all over the world suffer from some form of PTSD whether they have been in the military, have been sexually assaulted, or have been a part of some other form of traumatic event. One person’s PTSD isn’t any less real or painful than someone else’s, and the article by Dr. Lavie introduces objective and subjective findings for the immediate and long term effects as well as two different forms of treatment that can help ease patients into a better, healthier form of sleep.

They found in the subjective effects that people suffered from sleep disturbances almost immediately after the trauma, also fear and anxiety plague the patients. Something pretty interesting they found too was the fact that women were had a 50% higher chance to suffer from these effects. In their findings for long term effects patients suffered from a variety of sleep problems such as difficulty falling asleep, frequent awakenings, and most commonly trauma-related anxiety dreams. It was noted that some people continue to go through this for over 40 years, like I couldn’t imagine the pain and stress they feel on a daily basis.

On the objective side patient’s sleeping habits were observed and they found that the patients did have awakenings but there weren’t any signs of insomnia which is obviously something clearly different from the subjective effects. For the long term patients seemed to have a longer sleep latency, less time sleeping, and other various sleep problems.

To combat these findings, the article gave examples of two types of treatment behavioral and pharmacologic, the most practiced of behavioral being progressive muscle relaxation for those who are very anxious near bedtime. They even limited the amount of time spent in the bed to help make the bed a more peaceful environment for them. For pharmacologic treatment many things are claimed to be effective but there isn’t significant proof, but benzodiazepine hypnotics have been proven to help with sleepiness.

This work is pretty freaking amazing. I knew that people who suffered from PTSD often had night terrors and flash backs and stuff like that, but I never knew that this disorder took this big of a toll on these people. I can barely handle the day to day stress of just a normal day sometimes I cannot imagine the psychological toll this takes.