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
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.
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