What is PTSD?

A short video clip that explains what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is, who it affects, and how.

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Addressing trauma - body and mind

Interesting blog post about addressing trauma

“.. How can anyone address trauma without also focusing on the real impact such trauma has on the body? When you speak of rape survivors, abuse survivors, survivors of war - the body is just as important a point of focus as the mind ..”

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Unique Effects of Alcohol on Women

".. Among female alcoholics, a strong association with major depression has been demonstrated. The relative risk for heavy drinking is 2.60 times greater in women with a history of depression as compared to women without a history of depressive disorder .. Women also have a higher incidence of premorbid anxiety disorders,42 and a greater severity of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms than do men with similar traumatic exposures .."

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Recovered Memories

".. traumatized individuals respond by using a variety of psychological mechanisms. One of the most common means of dealing with the pain is to try and push it out of awareness. Some label the phenomenon of the process whereby the mind avoids conscious acknowledgment of traumatic experiences as dissociative amnesia. Others use terms such as repression, dissociative state, traumatic amnesia, psychogenic shock, or motivated forgetting. Semantics aside, there is near-universal scientific acceptance of the fact that the mind is capable of avoiding conscious recall of traumatic experiences.[12] A body of empirical evidence indicates that it is common for abused children to reach adulthood without conscious awareness of the trauma .. "

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Childhood Traumas: An Outline and Overview

" .. There appears to be a group of problems brought on in childhood by the experience of extreme fright generated by outside events. Some of these childhood problems are created by one external shock, and others are created by a multiplicity of blows. Untreated, all but the mildest of the childhood traumas last for years. The child’s responses, in fact, may create a number of different kinds of problems in adult life. There are four characteristics, however, that seem to affect almost everyone subjected to extreme terrors in childhood. These findings seem to last and can be retrieved in histories. They include repeated visualizations or other returning perceptions, repeated behaviors and bodily responses, trauma-specific fears, and revised ideas about people, life, and the future .. "

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