PTSD Awareness

All over the world, people suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, also known as PTSD. "To be exact, 5.2 million people do." When I say PTSD, I know most of you are thinking about people who have PTSD from serving our country, but let me tell you this. Yes, you are correct about that, but that is only one kind of PTSD. A person can develop PTSD for multiple reasons and events they have been through. Today, I will tell you about the four most common causes of why people develop PTSD through their lives.

PTSD is where a person goes through a life-threatening traumatic event such as sexual violence, military service, car accidents and many more. PTSD causes a person to have multiple symptoms of flashbacks, nightmares, and having negative reactions to reminders of the event. It all just depends on the person. One might suffer from flashbacks but not nightmares, and another might suffer from nightmares but not the flashback. Every person is uniquely different.

One of the common causes of PTSD is, unfortunately, sexual violence. All over the world, girls and boys are suffering from PTSD and they don’t know it. The scary thing is that sexual violence comes in many different forms such as rape, child molestation, incest, similar forms of non-consensual sexual contact, non-contact sexual abuse and many more. A lot of the time when someone goes through some sexual violence they know their attacker or abuser in some way. Even though there are millions of cases of sexual violence reported every year, the major cases of sexual violence go unreported. Most of the victims don’t report these cases because they sometimes feel guilty for it happening, or even that it is their fault that it happened to them. This is why many, many people suffer from PTSD when they have been gone through sexual violence. People try to keep it a secret and don’t tell anyone. It builds up and you know it’s slowly engulfing you in guilt even though it wasn’t or isn’t your fault. They don’t get the proper help that they need.

Another cause of PTSD is from being a soldier or a veteran. There are “about 11-20 out of every 100 veterans who served in OIF or OEF have PTSD in a given year.” They develop the PTSD from the things they see when they are fighting for our country and protection. It is very hard for a soldier to come home after they serviced our country, because things change in their lives. Even when they are not the one that changed. An easy way to describe it is like a big culture shock when they come back. They don’t know how to act around their family. They tend to suffer from nightmares, feeling at times that they are reliving those events they went through in the services.

Believe it or not, another common cause of PTSD is when people go through a natural disaster. There are multiple types of natural disasters: Tornadoes, tsunamis, mudslides, wildfires, and hurricanes, are only just a few. It’s scary for people to think that your life can be changed within a blink of an eye. You can even lose everything. This is why these people suffer from PTSD. They are scared and fear that the event they went through will happen again in just a matter of seconds. "As many as 95 percent and as few as 4.5 percent have been found to have PTSD after an earthquake." That is a lot of people who most of them go without any help with it.

The last common cause that I am going to talk about today is intimate partner violence. There are people that are in relationships with people that are abusive and most or a lot of the time the victim doesn’t see that they are actually getting hurt by this person. As if they have become numb to the world around them and they don’t want to believe what other people tell them. Intimate partner violence takes place between two people who are involved in a close relationship. It has been reported that at least one in ten people in relationships experience this type of trauma. Victims with PTSD of domestic violence can be known to repeat the violence cycle of abuse in others. Because they don’t know how to cope with being abused or how to get out of the situation, they create a violent cycle without meaning to do so.

PTSD, in my opinion, is one of the hardest mental disorders to live with. It feels like you are reliving your past constantly. Reminders of it all around you. There are multiple causes of PTSD and not just that they serviced this country. Many people suffer from PTSD and haven’t even stepped a foot on the battlefield. Please be aware that many people suffer with PTSD for many different reasons.

You can always contact me on my website, email, and my Instagram.

Email: [email protected], and on my website.

I am here for all of you. Thank you.

~Natalie Christensen