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 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.)
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