post traumatic stress in native american cultures
PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) is a psychological disorder that is caused by a person being exposed to a specific traumatic event. A symptom of PTSD is vivid flashbacks to the event that caused the traumatic stress. For example, soldiers that have gone to war in Afghanistan and come back with PTSD have been recorded having vivid nightmares that have to do with the stressful event. They can even wake up from these nightmares and attack their wives or girlfriends, believing briefly that they are back in the stressful situation that they were once in. PTSD also can be confused with depression because a person with PTSD often experiences a lack of interest in daily activities. A person can also experience being more irritable or just generally angry after the stressful event. More often than not people with PTSD have witnessed someone dying or being seriously injured; however, it can also be brought about by someone harming themselves or attempting suicide. Seemingly random daily occurrences can trigger a flashback for someone with PTSD. For example, someone who has PTSD from going to war can experience vivid and terrifying flashbacks from loud noises like the sound of glass breaking or fireworks exploding. During the time of WWII people got PTSD after coming back from deployment similar to the troops of today. The only difference was that it was called “shell shock”. Shell shock also included a disorder where people who experienced excessive artillery fire while in combat would shake uncontrollably for short periods of time after returning home.
PTSD is a very relevant problem to today’s society and major steps need to be taken in the name of research of recovery methods. People with PTSD are very hard to rehabilitate because their recovery has to do with them moving past what they have seen or done and becoming desensitized to it. This is nearly impossible because the events that cause PTSD are so stressful and traumatic to the victims that