DEFINITIONS
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) defines post traumatic disorder as a form of anxiety disorder that arises after person experiences events that threaten the life or physical safety. These traumatic events can include violent attacks, natural disasters that befall human beings, accident or war.
Post traumatic disorder is a condition that occurs after the extraordinary experience of a tense, terrifying and life-threatening, such as natural disasters, severe accidents, sexual abuse (sexual assault), or war.
Post traumatic disorder affects at least 8% of people sometimes throughout their lives, including childhood. Many people experience traumatic events, such as war veterans and victims of rape or other violent activities, experiencing post traumatic disorder.
SYMPTOMS
Three types of symptoms that often occur in post traumatic disorder are:
First, the repetition of traumatic experience, demonstrated by always reminded of the sad events that have experienced it, flashbacks (feeling as if the sad events that happen again), nightmares (bad dreams about the event -events that made him sad), emotional and physical reactions that excessive because it was triggered by memories of a sad event.
Second, emotional avoidance and shallow, is shown by avoiding activities, places, thinking, feeling, or conversations associated premises n trauma. It also lost interest in all things, feeling alienated from others, and shallow emotions.
Third, the increased sensitivity is indicated by difficulty sleeping, irritability / unable to control anger, difficulty concentrating, excessive vigilance, an exaggerated response of all.
TREATMENT
There are two kinds of drug therapies that can be done post traumatic disorder patients, using pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Treatment of pharmacotherapy can be a drug therapy only in the continuation treatment of patients who are well known.
Psychotherapy treatment, The therapists are highly concentrated on the problem of post traumatic disorder believe that there are three types of psychotherapy that can be used and effective for the treatment of post traumatic disorder, namely: anxiety management, cognitive therapy, exposure therapy.
In anxiety management, the therapist will teach you some skills to help overcome the symptoms of post traumatic disorder better through:
1) Relaxation training, to learn to control fear and anxiety in a systematic and relax major muscle groups,
2) breathing retraining, to learn to breathe with the stomach slowly, relax and avoid breathing in haste that cause feelings of discomfort, even a bad physical reaction such as heart palpitations and headaches,
3) Positive thinking and self-talk, to learn to remove negative thoughts and replace with positive thoughts when faced with things that create stress (stressors),
4) Assertiveness training, to learn how expresses expectations, opinions and emotions without blame or harms others,
5) Thought stopping, to learn how to take his mind when we’re thinking about the things that make us stress.
In cognitive therapy, the therapist helps to change the irrational belief that emotions interfere with and disrupt our activities. For example, a crime victim may blame themselves for not careful. The purpose of cognitive therapy is to identify the thoughts that are not rational, collected evidence that the mind is not rational to resist these thoughts which then adopts a more realistic thought to help achieve a more balanced emotions.
Meanwhile, in exposure therapy is the therapist helps to deal with special situations, other people, objects, memory or emotion that is reminiscent of the trauma and fear that is not realistic in her life. Therapy can be run by means of: exposure in the Imagination, which asked the patient to repeat the story in detail to not have obstacles to tell; or exposure in reality, which helps deal with situations that are now safe but want to avoid because it causes a very strong fear (eg returned home after a robbery at home). Fears grow stronger if we try to recall the situation rather than trying to forget. Repetition of the situation accompanied by a recurring awareness will help realize the situation is frightening past is no longer dangerous and can be solved.
In addition, also showed that play therapy (play therapy) may be useful in the treatment of children with post traumatic disorder. Play therapy is used to cure children with post traumatic disorder. Therapists use the game to start a topic that could not be started directly. This can help children feel more comfortable in the process with post traumatic disorder experiences.