PTSD – Diagnosis

Transcript

If it’s been three months or longer since you’ve had a life-threatening experience and you’re still having trouble moving on, going about your routine, getting back to your job, it really is time for you to see a professional, either your family, physician, or a therapist, and see what can be done to help you move along a little quicker. Of course, it depends on the severity of the incident you had and whether or not you were able to get any help right away. But if you still have intrusive thoughts and you still have nightmares, please see somebody who may be able to do a little bit of testing and put you more at ease. For instance, some of the tests are a series of questions whereby they kind of compare your answers to the answers of somebody who hasn’t been through trauma. And that could tell that therapist and your physician a lot. And even now we have great types of Neurodiagnostics: a functional MRI, where we can actually see what your brain is doing in different situations that are presented to you. Many people who have PTSD actually have this kind of reverberating pathway in their brain, where everything goes back to the fear center, the amygdala, the place of severe emotion. We need to see those patterns because it’s only by noticing those patterns that we can tell you how you can break them.