By : Giselle Meza & Hirayuki Avila

 A condition of persistent mental and emotional stress caused by an injury or severe psychological shock, typically involving disturbance of sleep and constant flashbacks, with dulled responses to others and to the outside world.

 Exposure to a traumatic event and subjective emotional response of fear, helplessness, or horror  Persistent re-experiencing of the traumatic event  Persistent avoidance and numbing  Persistent symptoms of increased arousal  Significant distress or impairment  Duration of at least 1 month

 Exposure to one or more traumatic events cause the development of the symptoms.  There are who have fear-based re-experiencing, emotional, and behavioral symptoms.  Meaning being exposed to a fear and having to relive once again and your emotions are everywhere causing you to act aggressively or even fearfully.

 Twelve month prevalence among U.S. adults is about 3.5%  In Europe and Asian, African, and Latin American countries is about 0.5% to 1.0%  PTSD various across cultural group and exposure to trauma  Survivors of rape, military combat and captivity and ethnical or political genocide have higher rate than most  It is found that the commonness in children and adolescents, like preschoolers, is very low due to criteria of in efficient development of information.

 Symptoms usually begin after first three months after trauma. However there may be months and even year before the criteria of the diagnosis are meet.  Duration of the symptoms varies. Some may recover within three months, whole others remain symptomatic for longer than twelve months and sometimes more than fifty years.

 Culture and cultural history can impact your likelihood and the severity.  Even without the traumatic event occurring to you, it still could affect you as well with the knowledge behind the history of your culture.  For instance, If you were a young Jew that’s family has experienced the holocaust you may be traumatized because of the background knowledge on the holocaust.  PTSD is more common in females than male and females are more likely to experience PTSD for a longer duration than do males.

 Pretraumatic factors  Temperamental: childhood emotional problems  Environmental: Lower socio economic status,lower education, and cultural characteristics.  Genetic and physiological:  Female and gender and your younger age at the time of trauma exposure  Pretraumatic factors  Severity(dose) of the trauma  Posttraumatic factors  Negative appraisals, inappropriate coping strategies and development of acute stress disorder  Subsequent exposure to repeated upsetting reminders, subsequent adverse life events and financial or other trauma –related losses.

 Acute Stress disorder: Distinguished from PTSD because the symptom pattern in acute stress disorder is restricted to a duration of 3 days to 1 month following exposure to traumatic event.  Obsessive-compulsive disorder: In OCD, there are recurrent thoughts. However those thoughts are not on a traumatic event rather they meet the definition of an obsession.

 Born: June 20,1925  Location :Kingston, Hunt County, Texas, US  Suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after his return from the war.  He suffered from insomnia, depression, and nightmares related to the war  His first wife Wanda claimed that he had once held her at gunpoint.  Son of poor Texas sharecroppers  Actor  Became an advocate for the needs of veterans.

 Post-traumatic stress disorder would rely on the psychodynamic and socio-cultural perspectives since it is not a disorder that you are biologically born with but it is something that is learned either from your culture or traumatic experience.