- How has trauma affected your life?
- Has it affected the way you feel?
- Have friendships suffered?
- Are you still able to have feelings for loved ones?
- Do you ever feel numb?
- How do you see the future?
- Has the trauma affected your interest in activities?
Licensed C&P Examiner Interview Tips (2022)
Do You Have PTSD? Questions to Ask Yourself
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the extreme emotional and physical response following a traumatic event. Symptoms begin within the first month after the event and persist for many weeks or months afterward. An estimated 7-8% of the population will have PTSD at some point during their life, and about 8 million adults live with PTSD every year.
Are you wondering whether you have post-traumatic stress disorder?
Did you experience a traumatic event?
Have you experienced a traumatic event during your life? It may have been a few months ago or a few years ago; sometimes post-traumatic stress disorder doesn’t develop until years after the event. For example, responses to childhood trauma can manifest much later in life, even in late adulthood.
What is the difference between a ‘normal’ trauma and a big trauma, such as surviving a school shooting? Are the symptoms different? Does one ‘matter’ more than the other?
There isn’t really a ‘normal’ trauma, as trauma by its very nature is always overwhelming, disturbing and disruptive and whatever its origin can have a significantly adverse impact on a person’s physical and psychological well-being. Thus every trauma matters. However, certain types of trauma, especially when they involve intended harm, violence, cruelty, killings and injuries inflicted on humans by other humans, involving the loss of children or closed loved ones are usually much harder to come to terms with. Further the effect of some of these ‘larger scale’ traumas does not only severely impact those directly affected but its shock also ripples into and affects whole communities and larger social networks. The initial symptoms for those affected would be those of an Adjustment Disorder to stressful life events and may include secondary symptoms of traumatic grief, depression, anxiety and a number of dissociative symptoms. After a month’s time these may develop into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Trauma affects each person differently depending on a variety of underlying factors, including their developmental age, the internal and external resources available to them, their life circumstances, including their past life history, emotional maturity and resilience, their family and support network, their health, the help and support provided during and immediately following the trauma and others. Thus it is very difficult to make predictions as to the effect on each individual, however, the psychological consequences of such events can be enormous on a person’s life.
What effect does time have on PTSD and trauma? Does time make it easier to live with it? Why?
Time itself does not usually help people to recover if a trauma has been totally overwhelming and the person has been affected by PTSD, as this would have led to neurophysiological changes in the body, which do not get healed by time alone. On the surface it may seem that those affected by PTSD have come to terms with the impact of their trauma, because it is difficult for outsiders to glean the actual internal psychological wounds people may be carrying. People may have learnt to adjust through processes of dissociation from the traumatic experiences and by avoiding reminders of the events that happened. This can lead to a heavily restricted quality of life and those affected by PTSD often can’t share with others how they are truly feeling inside. The PTSD may affect their ability to maintain close relationships with others, they may alternate between feelings of numbness and shut-down and feelings of hyperarousal, flashbacks and irritability. They may be on constant alert to potential triggers in their environment. Their sleep might be very disrupted and they may be plagued by nightmares and bad dreams. They may also suffer from concentration problems and their day-to-day memory may be affected. Many sufferers of these symptoms adapt by splitting into a so-called “Apparently normal functioning” Personality (ANP) part that is oriented towards helping them get on with life as best as possible, while attempting to keep away or dissociate from the emotional, traumatised parts of self (EPs). These EPs stay stored away in subconscious or unconscious memory systems often in the form of body memory, from which they interfere at unbidden times with a person’s ability to functioning.
FAQ
What questions do they ask for PTSD?
- Did you experience a traumatic event? …
- Do you regularly relive or re-experience the event? …
- Do you avoid certain people, situations, or places? …
- Do you blame yourself for what happened? …
- Do you have a hard time remembering certain features of the event?
How do you interview someone with PTSD?
- Treat people with respect and gratitude. …
- Be a human and express empathy. …
- Respect boundaries and give the subject their agency. …
- If possible, get to know the person before interviewing them about the traumatic event(s) they’ve experienced.
What is a PTSD questionnaire?
What are the 3 major elements of PTSD?
