I want to start off by saying I take mental health very seriously and have no doubt in my mind that PTSD is very real. My brother suffers from it and it is hell. This is a science question – I don’t want anybody to take this the wrong way. I am simply trying to understand the disease better and its origins.
Why does visual trauma we experience – horrific scenes, gore (I.e. warfare), etc. cause PTSD? In other words, how does it actually damage neurological function? Why does it reoccur in episodes?
In: Biology
I’m no expert but I wonder if secondary trauma has anything to do with it? Now I’m curious myself!
I don’t have a full answer for you but a partial one. In a regularly functioning brain distressing memories are processed during sleep and then they get like a checkmark of “well we dealt with that”. After which the memory rarely comes up unless it was tied to something else you were thinking about thematically or whatever.
For PTSD, even though the process happens of ‘review distressing memory’ there is a failure to get the ‘ok we processed this one’ checkmark. This results in the memory just sitting in the ‘needs to be processed’ waiting area, and you keep reliving the freaking thing that is traumatizing you. Which is why PTSD people often have the recurring nightmares.
I’m not sure on the exact mechanisms for how or why these things happen. Maybe someone else can fill in the gaps. (What I recall there is like bits and pieces from a podcast I heard a while back, so accuracy maaay be a little off.)
PTSD and why it happens isn’t 100% understood, much like most things involving the human brain. However, we can take a guess based on what we do know about the brain and how it works.
Our brains, and most animals’ brains, are built around keeping us alive. That’s what they’re built to do as their primary function. To do this, they take in and remember things that will help with survival, and if something that hurts happens, we hold onto that so we know how to avoid it in the future. Our eyesight is our primary sense, so that’s the primary way we take in information for this purpose. Because humans are social creatures, we take in others’ experiences too, even if we don’t personally experience them. That’s why when you see someone get hurt, you might wince yourself or say “ow” despite not actually being the one hurt.
However, brains aren’t perfect and are actually quite fragile, and are so complex that flaws and problems can easily emerge, much like bugs in a computer. A brain is literally a mass of flesh that taught itself to think, so it is not a perfectly designed system. If a brain experiences something that overloads its capacity to deal with it, such as witnessing a particularly horrific scene or going through something traumatic, its ability to store and learn from that experience might break. The brain might get caught in a loop of replaying that experience to try and learn what it thinks it needs to, even if there’s nothing else to learn. Getting stuck in this process can get in the way of other brain functions, increase stress that breaks more systems, and altogether causes all sorts of problems for the sufferer.
TLDR: PTSD is the brain’s ability to digest traumatic experiences breaking and causing the person to relive the experience instead of remember it.
PTSD describes a reduced ability to regulate your nervous system. It doesn’t have to just be visual trauma. Any traumatic experience can lead to PTSD.
Trauma is the result of a negative experience which has a lasting, negative effect. Common responses are fear, avoidance, anger, depression, basically negative mental health symptoms.
If you start with the understanding that trauma is simply a way to describe an experience which has a lasting negative impact on mental health then it’s easier to understand PTSD. It’s just a way to describe the symptoms associated with unresolved trauma.
Being personally involved in an experience, reliving it by recalling the memory of it, or watching it happen to something else all produce, to various intensities, the same type of emotional experience.
Well, we take in information through our senses and translate that into perception and that leads to thoughts and emotions. Trauma is about thoughts an emotions, so seeing something that causes you great distress, hearing something being said/screamed/blowing up, can also cause long lasting impacts on mental health.
The senses that take in the information is irrelevant, it’s how the information is processed in thoughts and emotional responses.
I want to start with saying I don’t approve of drug abuse, but I know we are at a crux of understanding and developing new medicines.
There has been a decent push in the medical community for some additional testing of psilocybin and therapies to help treat PTSD. Some clinical trials that I read the papers of were very promising, and I would recommend seeing if your brother qualifies or if there are case studies near you.
PTSD is horrible and I’m hoping your brother can find help in attaining peace
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