Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Is Shitty
When I first tell somebody that I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I can see their eyes unintentionally light up as they question whether or not to ask what happened to me. They can’t help it, humans are fixated on the morbid side of humanity. The bad and scary is interesting from 100 feet away. Luckily, I’ve moved past the point of trying to hide my traumatic experiences, but many have not. I used to squirm at that question and try to laugh it off, trying to pretend that it wasn’t a big deal and that it was just a way my brain reacted to some ordinary events.
It was difficult for me to speak about the problems I faced because I didn’t want to remember what happened to me. I was afraid that if I talked about it, it would in some way make everything more real. My PTSD is the product of childhood abuse and neglect, an attempted abduction, witnessing multiple stabbings, and being raped 4 times. I’m not going to get into the grimy details, but hopefully that’s enough to tide over your curiosity.
Before I was diagnosed with PTSD I was diagnosed with Severe Depression and Anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Seasonal Affective Disorder and EDNOS (Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified). I didn’t understand that not all flashbacks were what you see on TV: a vietnam veteran throwing over tables and chairs, convinced that he was back in ‘nam getting shot at. I thought that my flashbacks were just bad memories, but when I started talking to a therapist about how real those memories could get, she told me that it sounded like I had PTSD.
Fast forward a couple months and the flashbacks were so bad that I would have to leave school in the middle of the day to go walk in the woods, occasionally smoke a joint or a cigarette, and do some grounding exercises so that I wouldn’t let anybody know what was really going on. Teachers and administrators hated me. I didn’t do any work in or out of class, I was just creating escape plans in my mind.
How would I get out of this room if shit hit the fan? How was I going to get out of this school? I was convince that someone was following me. I didn’t know why, I thought it was someone hired by one of my perpetrators, trying to either finish the job or capture me to ensure my eternal silence.
In my mind, being in school was just an amateur mistake, any dumbass could find me there. I had a schedule that I followed every day, and it wouldn’t be difficult to find a window to take me out cleanly. I didn’t trust anyone.
I stopped going to classes regularly. I avoided buses and any form of travel that could make my death look like a tragic accident. Instead, I found myself either writing in the woods or sitting in on a class I found interesting, usually computer science or history.
Weed helped me handle flashbacks and the idea that the world was working against me. It made everything seem more like an interesting story than a fucked up life. I went to therapy high, it helped make opening up much easier than if I was sober. If I would have used it in moderation, I think it would have been much more effective, but I didn’t have the resources to have a doctor tell me exactly how much to use, so I used as much as I could.
I still showed severe PTSD symptoms including mood instability, substance abuse, self-mutilation, cyclical eating disorder behaviors, and panic attacks. It wasn’t until months after I was hospitalized that I learned that all of these behaviors fall under PTSD. I wasn’t Bipolar or Borderline, I was just dealing with the symptoms of PTSD.
I’d been passing out for about a year when I started having seizures. The doctors in the hospital thought it was a reaction to a new medication, but I had a feeling the two were related. They took me off of the medication, and I kept having seizures. After I finally got through my insurance to try and get a visit to a neurologist covered, I walked in expecting to be told that I had a tumor. What other explanation was there for a sixteen year old kid having rapid weight loss, blackouts, and seizures? That isn’t normal. When I started talking to the neurologist, she seems interested in my PTSD. I thought that it was just the morbid humanity factor, but it turns out that seizures and blackouts are par for the course when it comes to PTSD. I had talked to about six different doctors about my seizures before speaking to the neurologist, and nobody knew that severe physical symptoms could be connected to PTSD.
I was happy that it wasn’t a tumor, but I was pissed that nobody had even mentioned this as a possibility in the time before I went to a neurologist. Why the hell wasn’t it common knowledge that PTSD can cause seizures? Why wasn’t it common knowledge that any mental illness can come with severe physical problems? We don’t like to admit that mental illness affects more than just your mental state, because we don’t like to talk about mental illness. I speak out about my problems in the hope that it will help someone else in my situation, and I encourage you to do the same. With that in mind, here’s some more general information about PTSD and trauma.
PTSD stands for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, also known as “that one fucking terrible piece of shit disorder”. A person can develop PTSD after living through a form of trauma. It isn’t the traumatic event that causes the disorder, it’s whether the person experienced that event as a trauma. It’s complicated. In order to understand the disorder, you have to first know what being traumatized actually is.
Trauma is defined as a “deeply distressing or disturbing influence.” In regards to PTSD, it’s often referred to as an experience in which your life was threatened or you witnessed a life-threatening event.
Unfortunately, that’s a pretty terrible way to describe being traumatized. Being traumatized is usually caused by trauma, but can even be caused by something that seems as insignificant as a breakup. The difference between experiencing an event and a traumatic event is the way that your mind reacts to the event.
One person could get into a car crash and continue driving to work every day, living their life as they did before the crash. Another person could get into the exact same car crash and develop a fear of driving, making them incapable of going to work and living their life as they did before the crash. The first person just experienced the crash as an event, the second experienced it as a traumatic event.
Some people feel, see, taste, smell, and/or hear the event(s) that have given them PTSD during a flashback. The “realness” of the flashback depends on the person experiencing the flashback. Some people completely dissociate, and others are capable of telling reality from their flashbacks. Most of the time people can tell what is reality and what is a flashback, but it varies from person to person.
1. Flashbacks are visible
2. PTSD only happens to soldiers or rape victims
3. PTSD symptoms happen immediately after the traumatic event
4. A person having a flashback cannot tell the difference between reality and flashback
5. Only people who can’t handle hard situations develop PTSD
1. Re-experiencing the event through flashbacks, bad dreams, or frightening thoughts (sometimes mistaken for severe anxiety)
2. Distancing yourself from the event, both literally and figuratively.
Literally: Staying away from people, places or things that remind you of the event.
Figuratively: Difficulty remembering time during flashbacks and the traumatic event, dissociation, feeling guilty, sad, or emotionally numb and losing interest in activities. These symptoms are often mistaken for depression.
3. “Overreacting” to things that don’t seem to be a problem to others.
PTSD comes with hypertension, feeling “jumpy”, on edge, and sometimes outbursts of anger.
(National Institute For Mental Health)
Physical Symptoms of PTSD
Racing heart, raised blood-pressure, excessive sweating, memory loss, blackouts, loss of consciousness, psychoactive non-epileptic seizures, bedwetting, weight loss/gain, panic attacks, hot flashes, chills, tiredness, chronic pain, stomach pain, diarrhea, burning in the chest, cramps, lower back pain
Common Co-Existing Disorders And Behaviors
Dissociative Identity Disorder, Panic Disorder, Acute Stress Disorder, Depression, Anxiety, Phobias, Anorexia/Bulimia/EDNOS,Self-Mutilation
EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy, immersion therapy, trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, medication (blood pressure medications, anxiety and depression medications), family therapy.
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