When Holiday Cheer Means Holiday Jeer
Holiday Season may not be jolly for PTSD survivors, but help is available
By Denise Mann
‘Tis the season for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), experts tell Healthnewsdigest.com.
For the majority of us, the holiday season is a time filled with joy, cheer, family and friends, but for trauma survivors, the holidays can be extremely stressful. Affecting about 5.2 million of U.S. adults yearly, PTSD can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal. Many people with PTSD repeatedly re-experience the ordeal with flashbacks, nightmares or intrusive thoughts. Other symptoms may include sleep disturbances, depression, anxiety and irritability.
“If someone is going through the holidays alone or the trauma came from within the family, the contrast between seeing people on the street with loved ones who appear to be having a happy season can awaken the pangs of loss, loneliness and even anger,” explains Randall Marshall, MD, director of Trauma Studies and Services and the associate director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City. The social withdrawal and isolation that are hallmarks of PTSD may compound the problem, says Dr. Marshall, also an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
"The good news about PTSD is that it’s very treatable,” he says. “Unfortunately, the vast majority of people don’t get appropriate help because there is a real reluctance to share the experience and the level of the impairment [it caused] because of the shame associated with PTSD,” says Dr. Marshall,
“If you have experienced a severe trauma or any experience that has been very disturbing emotionally and you believe that months or years down the road, it is continuing to effect you, talk to your doctor because the ability to recognize and diagnose PTSD has improved dramatically,” Dr. Marshall says.
Cognitive behavior therapies in which the patient gradually and repeatedly relives the frightening experience under controlled conditions and medication including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Paxil (paroxetine HCl) and Zoloft (sertraline HCL) have proven extremely successful in treating PTSD.
SSRIs help restore the balance of the mood chemical serotonin. In a study of more than 550 people with PTSD, researchers at Columbia University found that people taking Paxil showed significant improvements in all measures of PTSD, compared to people taking placebo.
More than Veterans
PTSD can follow a traumatic experience, such as surviving or witnessing a violent physical attack or injury, being in a serious accident, seeing someone killed and surviving a terrorist bomb blast or war.
Former model Marla Hanson has first-hand experience with PTSD. In 1986, Hanson was a promising model, but a pair of attackers hired by her landlord slashed her face with a razor. Doctors were miraculously able to reconstruct her face but the emotional scars took much longer to heal.
Now fabulous at 40 with a daughter, a career and a new book on PTSD in the works, she could grace the cover of any magazine or runway, but instead she chooses to spend her time talking about her experience to help counselors better reach PTSD patients.
Her Story
“After the trial ended [and her attackers were jailed], I slept, and slept and slept and slept,” she says to a room of close to 40 therapists at FEGS, a not-for-profit health and human service organization that serves the New York area. “It was about three months of non-stop sleeping,” she says.
People subscribe to the attitude that time heals all wounds, she says, noting that even her own family thought she should be able to move on now that the assailants were jailed.
Fortunately, a close friend intervened. Together with a therapist, Hanson began to work through her issues. “It started with getting up one day a week and coming to therapy and from there I started to get up every day before two and then noon and pretty soon I was getting up, eating and doing my laundry and developing a future plan,” she says.
Hanson finished a degree in film and television at New York University. She sold her first screenplay and things were looking up.
She thought she was free and clear.
She wasn’t.
After quitting her job to pursue other interests and ending a long-standing relationship, her demons began to re-emerge. “I was paralyzed and walked around New York City hoping I would die,” she says.
This time, she checked herself into a room at the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan and thought about ways to kill herself.
A Lightbulb moment
After several months of unreturned phone messages, a good friend found her at the hotel. Still depressed, she went to Newport RI to get away and spend some time with friends. On the bus ride, she sat next to a veteran who recognized her and said: “You must really have PTSD.”
But it happened 10 years ago, she said, and the veteran replied: “well that is why they call it POST.”
“It was the first time I had talked to someone who really understood what I was grappling with,” she said, Up until this tome, no-one had called it PTSD, she says.
Feeling validated, she went back into therapy and found that there was now medication available. Hanson found relief from Paxil and about six months of therapy.
Within one year, she had her life back. “Recovery is a practical process,” she says. “It is something that you participate in and it is hard work.”
She admits returning to therapy after the world trade center disaster on 9/11. “If you have been through something terrible, your antennas are way up and are hypersensitive to tragedy,” she says.
We can all learn from Hanson’s experience, says social worker Amy Dorin, senior vice president of behavioral health at F.E.G.S. Along with therapy and/or medication, “eating right, exercising regularly. And writing or doing art to express their feelings about the trauma can be very helpful,” she says
For more information about PTSD, contact: National Institute of Mental Health at 1-88-88-ANXIETY (1-888-826-9438 or visit the website at http://www.nimh.nih.gov