Individual Programmatic Assessment: Disorder Paper

Individual Programmatic Assessment: Disorder Paper

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PTSD is the Post-traumatic disorder related to the mental health conditions that are triggered by a terrifying event or incident. In this disorder maybe the sufferer has personally experienced that event, or maybe he has just witnessed that terrifying event. It is the disorder that develops in people when they experienced or witness any scary, shocking or dangerous event.

Psychological underpinnings of PTSD:

This disorder causes the brain of the sufferer to get stuck in the same danger mode that he has experienced. Psychologically the patients keep on getting a high alert even when there is no such danger. Studies have shown that the part that controls the feelings of fear in the brain (the amygdala) gets more active than the normal activation, in people who suffer from this disorder. Psychological underpinnings also include changes in that part of the brain that used to control the memory of a person, and this area becomes smaller.

Symptoms of PSTD:

There are many symptoms of this disorder, but the most common symptoms include flashbacks, nightmares, extreme anxiety, and uncontrollable thoughts about a particular event. Another primary sign is avoiding talking about that event and avoiding certain places, people that may remind the patient about that threatening event.

Treatments of PTSD:

Many treatments could be given to the patients who have PTSD but following are the primary treatments:

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)

It is one of the forms of CBT that takes help of cognitive therapy for evaluating and changing the thoughts related to the trauma that cause fear in a person. This treatment spots a light on the patient and his way of thinking about this world, other people and his/her own self after experiencing a particularly traumatic event. Many times, a thought of a particular event prevents the patient’s recovery. In this treatment, the focus is on the ideas about whether facts are supporting these thoughts that causes terror in the patient or not. It would not be wrong to say that the effectiveness of CTP has been recorded in a wide range of traumas and that is helpful in most cases.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

It is one of the treatments given to the patients suffering from PTSD, and it is a form of psychotherapy that would be involving processing upsetting trauma-related thoughts, feelings and memories (Beer,et,al,2018). In this type of treatment, the patient is asked to pay attention to a sound, or a back and forth movement while keeping the thought of the traumatic event in mind.

Medication:

Generally, PTSD could be treated using selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) (Downs,et,al,2018). It is the antidepressant drug that is mainly used, and it is one of the most effective drugs for civilian trauma.

Symptom of reduction after three types of treatment:

From the research, it has been seen that the three treatments that have been discussed above, caused significant reduction in the symptoms of PTSD. The rate of symptom reduction has been seen at its peak in CPT, which is a kind of counseling, in which the patients are trained how to handle distressing thoughts carefully so that these thoughts won’t be able to affect recovery of patients. Cognitive reconstruction is the most useful part that helps in the reduction of the symptoms of PTSD (Stirman,et,al,2018). Next comes on the list, the treatment of EMDR, but there are some side effects of it as well, in the rate of reduction of PTSD symptoms. In the end, comes medication that has the least effective outcomes if compared with the other two treatments as it greatly affects health of the patients.

Comparison of effectiveness of three treatments:

The effectiveness of the three therapies given to the patients of PTSD could be seen by comparing them. All these three treatments are beneficial, but there are some restrictions in all these treatments that may affect the effectiveness of each treatment. As far as the validity, efficacy, recidivism and behavior management is concerned, CPT comes at the top as the patient is being treated by assisting him/her psychologically that would not cast any drastic effects on the health of patient. Recidivism would be reduced in the same type of treatment as the patient would be capable of handling his undesirable behavior. If talked about efficacy, patients find CPT as the most reliable treatment. Behavior management would be achieved at a fast rate in EMDR and medicines would work earlier than any other alternative, but the efficacy of EMDR would be excellent in children as compared to the rest of the forms of treatment.

Contemporary attitude towards treatments:

CPT treatment as helps the patient in learning how to modify and challenge unhelpful beliefs so, this type of treatment is most appreciated by people. A formal attitude against this treatment is that the patient becomes careful and formal about processing the trauma that increases anxiety level in him. When the patients start identifying and addressing the unhelpful thoughts regarding an event they start using the same skills for modifying those beliefs that would be related to a traumatic event. Though this is the most acceptable and effective form of treatment, this thing should be also kept in consideration that it was developed with written trauma, for being a component of the treatment. While in the case of EMDR, attitude of people is not much satisfactory and people don't have a welcoming attitude for this type of treatment because EMDR causes heightened awareness for thinking power which cannot be tracked back to normal rate immediately after a session ends. Attitude of people is not much welcoming for the medication as well, because this fact cannot be denied that every medicine cast some adverse effects on the user. It has been seen that people have a non-welcoming attitude for medication because the drugs used mostly causes headache, nausea, drowsiness, jittery feelings and many issues while the time of sex as well.

References:

Stirman, S. W., Gutner, C. A., Suvak, M. K., Adler, A., Calloway, A., & Resick, P. (2018). Homework completion, patient characteristics, and symptom change in cognitive processing therapy for PTSD. Behavior therapy, 49(5), 741-755.

Beer, R. (2018). Efficacy of EMDR Therapy for Children With PTSD: A Review of the Literature. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research, 12(4), 177-195.

Downs, D. L. (2018). PTSD: A systematic approach to diagnosis and treatment. Current Psychiatry, 17(4), 35.