Research claims to shed light on post-traumatic stress disorder

Reading this and looking back on my own life, leaves me to believe this is yet another load of crap study they are trying to pull off all over again. So many of these studies have been done to death and have lead to nowhere.

First, I'm sure you've noticed I am a female. This study suggests childhood and environment along with IQ? Well, considering my father was a violent alcoholic very experienced with beating my older brother and breaking almost everything in the house, along with constant load shouting matches with my Mom, according to this study, I must have PTSD. See my life was begun with this kind of upbringing, followed by getting pushed off a slide at the age of 4 onto concrete fracturing my scull and resulting in a concussion. This wasn't the worst but I very well could have died because the idiot at the emergency room didn't know how to read an X-ray properly and told my Mom to just take me home. My scull was cracked all the way around and the next morning, my eyelid was swollen shut. I was rushed to the emergency room and was admitted right away.

This wasn't the last of the trauma for me. It was followed by more nights of my father's violence and the fact I tried to crack my scull again so that my parents would stop fighting. Later in life I was in a terrible car accident and this was followed by an ex-husband who tried to kill me one night by beating me. Divorce filed for and he then ended up stalking me for over a year. This was followed by the miscarriage of twins when I was married to my current husband for two years and I would have bled to death had the doctors not stopped it. This was followed by an infection after giving birth to our daughter that ended up going thru my entire system and I almost died yet again. There were other times but I won't go into more because I think so far, the point has been proven.

While I don't have PTSD, the difference is not that I am stronger or any better than anyone else. I am still searching for the reason but all indications point to faith and my own understanding of God. It's not that people have weak faith but they just understand things differently than I do.

I share all the characteristics with the people I've met over the years including my husband and I wondered why they had PTSD but I didn't. I am compassionate, sympathetic and empathetic. There are times when some of the stories I hear and the stress I'm under doing what I do result in nightmares and terrible dreams but they fade away. I get depressed and cry, just as I get angry and get over it. I tend to not hold onto bad thoughts or emotions even though I've had plenty of reason to hang onto all of it. Even at this moment writing this I'm wondering yet again what the answer is. But the difference between me and veterans is that I have never been in combat. What I faced was different than their stressors.

I can also tell you that each time my life was on the line, recovering from it was harder and harder to manage. This report does not take into account the prevalence of PTSD after multiple tours of duty. It also does not take into account people like me. My husband was the perfect young child according to his family and I,,well let's just say I was a trouble maker. It was my way of coping with the life I had.

In my opinion for what it's worth, this is yet again another study that is a pure waste of time when they could actually be doing something that was not already done in the last 30 years!

Research sheds light on post-traumatic stress disorder


By Jean-Louis Santini, AFP
February 16, 2009
CHICAGO - Research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can haunt former soldiers and survivors of catastrophes, is shedding light on who may be more vulnerable, and how best to treat each case.


"Interestingly, there are some individuals who, when confronted with extreme stress, their hormone profile is rather unique," said Deane Aikins, a psychiatrist at Yale University in Connecticut, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) which ends Monday.


"It doesn't reach the same peak as the rest of us. So we are ready to scream in our chair, and there are certain individuals who just don't get as stressed. Their stress hormones are actually lower and the peptides that down regulate that stress are quite higher," he explained.

"For example for rape, about 50 per cent of women developed PTSD and why is that? One issue is the severity of the trauma but we also found that early childhood and genetic factors influence who develop PTSD much later in life," she said.

She and her colleague found factors such as low IQ early as age 5, difficult temperament at age 3 and then family environment factors such as growing up in poverty, having a depressed mother, moving often or being separated from parents at a young age all could help predispose people to developing the condition.


Also "some people have genetic variants that make them more vulnerable to the effects of trauma," so now "basically we know now that PTSD is not just about the trauma, that early child characteristics, family environment and genetic factors influence how people respond to horrible events during their life," she said.

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Research sheds light on post-traumatic stress disorder