Re: Is this PTSD?
Bearcrazy
As with many disorders these days; there is a definative criteria that is set out by the American Psychiatric Society to which you need to be assessed by in order to be diagnosed formally with PTSD.
This is NOT to say that you are not struggling from severe anxiety as a result of the distressing event at work.
PTSD is one of the widely recognised anxiety disorders. It has only existed as a formal diagnosis in the past 20 years as outlined by APA (American Psychiatric Association in1980, the DSM-III (the Diagnostic and Statistical Model of Mental Disorders- version 3 ) 1980 and WHO (World Health Organisation) in1992).
A diagnosis of PTSD using the Diagnostic and Statistical Model of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) can only be made after a person has been exposed to an extreme traumatic stressor involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death/serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of themselves or others and following such an event where the persons response involved intense fear, helplessness or horror, which results in the patient struggling to manage their life as they did before the event.
The diagnostic criteria for PTSD as outlined by the American Psychiatric Association is as follows
APA (1994) diagnostic criteria:
The person was exposed to a traumatic event that involved (A1) actual or threatened death or serious injury and (A2) their response was one of fear, helplessness or horror.
The traumatic event is persistently experienced in one or more of the following ways (B): recurrent recollections; recurrent dreams; flashbacks; intense cue-sensitivity; physiological reactivity
Persistent avoidance of things associated with the trauma, in three or more of the following ways (C): avoiding thoughts; avoiding activities; inability to recall; diminished interest; detachment; restricted affect; sense of foreshortened future.
Persistent increased arousal, in two or more of the following (D): difficult sleeping; irritability; difficulty concentrating; hypervigilance; exaggerated startle response.
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Meg
proactiveness, positivity, persistence, perseverance and practice = progress