Behavior Therapy for People With PTSD

BEHAVIOR THERAPY FOR PEOPLE WITH PTSD
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PTSD AND CBT
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD is a mental condition that occurs mainly in people that have experienced severely stressful experiences, either directly or indirectly. A diagnosis of PTSD requires one to come into contact with stimuli that evoke emotion caused by the traumatic event, such as a loud touch or an accidental touch. They usually tend to relive their experiences either through nightmares or flashbacks. The most effective way of treating people with PTSD is cognitive behavior therapy. A person's beliefs and feelings shape reality. Changing one's negative ideas will almost certainly change one's experience. Mindfulness, meditation, talk therapy, and a few more strategies are used in CBT. All of these methods ensure that the client is aware of their surroundings. This is fundamentally what CBT is all about and how it comes in to help PTSD patients. It is a psychiatric disorder that may occur in people who have witnessed or experienced an event that they perceive as traumatic such as a terrorist attack, an accident, robbery, childbirth experiences, combat in war, rape, or a near-death experience (Patra & Sarkar, 2013). It can occur immediately after experiencing a disturbing event or even take days, weeks, months, or even years to manifest. People with PTSD have intense, disturbing thoughts after the traumatic experience has ended.
Symptoms of PTSD are classified into four major categories. First, there is the classic avoidance, where the victim stays away from reminders of the traumatic experiences as a coping mechanism to shield them from memories of the event. This could happen by avoiding places, people, memories, activities, objects, or even situations that evoke those memories. Secondly, there are the different reactive tendencies. Some people living with PTSD may exhibit reactive symptoms like irritability, anger, outbursts, violence, self-destruction, lack of sleep, being overly watchful of one's surroundings, being easily startled, and engaging in risky behavior (Torres, Nelson & West, 2020). Thirdly, there is the subtle intrusion, where the victim suffers from intrusive memories, flashbacks, nightmares or distressing dreams, and involuntary memories. In some instances, the intrusions are so overwhelming that the victim seems to be in a trance or is experiencing an out-of-body experience.
In some cases, the victims suffer from a lack of concentration. Finally, there is the disruptive altered mood and cognitive functions. Here, there are instances when the victims experience altered reality whereby they blame themselves for the traumatic event. They may also exhibit distorted beliefs about themselves, or others distort the truth about the actual occurrences of that experience, fear, guilt, regret, shame, and detachment from activities they previously enjoyed.
In some cases, victims suffer from a lack of memory of the event (Torres, Nelson & West, 2020).The article Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Depression and Self-Care in Heart Failure Patients. JAMA Internal Medicine, 175(11), 1773 by a team of scholars led by Freedland, offers an in-depth view into CBT.
Summary of Current Research and Thinking on CBT for PTSD.
Over the past several years, CBT has been embraced as the best approach to combatting PTSD. Several studies have shown that it is still the single most effective approach to handling PTSD and even major cases of depression. The article Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Depression and Self-Care in Heart Failure Patients. JAMA Internal Medicine, 175(11), 1773 by a team of scholars led by Freedland, breaks down all that is there to know about CBT, dissecting the finer details and raising new questions.
According to Freedland and others (2015), CBT has successfully treated psychological ailments like bipolar disorder, childhood depressive and anxiety disorders, and social phobia. They found out that it was a more effective approach to combat depression than the administration of antidepressants. The use of antidepressants on the patients showed a higher likelihood of relapse than undergoing the CBT.
Changing one's negative ideas will almost certainly change one's experience. Mindfulness, meditation, and talk therapy are some CBT strategies. All of these methods ensure that the client is aware of their surroundings. People with major mental diseases have been treated with Cognitive Behavior Therapy. It primarily focuses on the interaction between a person's thoughts, emotions, and general conduct. It's a method of ensuring that the patient's thoughts are free of distress. According to To vote and his team (2015), the therapy works based on establishing a friendly relationship between the patient and the therapist. This friendship ensures that there is the creation of openness between the two, thereby making the treatment session easier and more effective. It is simple to recognize the problem and come up with long-term solutions when the two have a good relationship.
Hayes (2016) notes that guided discovery is one of the essential approaches in CBT. It entails listening and learning the patient's perspectives on several life issues to know how they think and perceives their distinct realities. It is done by asking the therapist questions in gentle probing. These questions might be about basically anything, including the routine aspects of the patient's life. The patient might not even realize it, but their responses provide a vital platform to map out their thought processes. This usuall...