Anxiety Disorders

Acute Stress Disorder / Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Acute Stress Disorder can be experienced when a person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which the person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury or a threat to the physical integrity of self and others.

Symptoms of Acute Stress Disorder, that cause clinically significant distress or impairment, can be experienced during or immediately after the trauma, last for at least two days and resolve within four weeks after the traumatic event. When symptoms persist beyond one month a diagnosis may be made of 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder  

Symptoms include

• A subjective sense of numbing, detachment or absence of emotional responsiveness.  
• A sense of being in a daze   Derealisation   
• Depersonalisation   
• Dissociative amnesia. the inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma   
• Marked symptoms of anxiety   
• Difficulty sleeping   Irritability   
• Poor concentration   
• Hyper vigilance  
• Exaggerated startle response   

The traumatic event is persistently re-experienced in at least one of the following ways 

• Recurrent images 
• Recurrent thoughts 
• Dreams  
• Flashback episodes  
• A sense of reliving the experience, or distress on exposure to reminders of the the traumatic event  
• Marked avoidance of stimuli that arouse recollections of the trauma : thoughts, feelings conversations, activities, places, people.

From the American Psychiatrist Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Washington DC, American Psychiatrist Association 1994