Can You Suffer PTSD from a Motor Vehicle Accident? How Does Trauma Therapy Treat PTSD?
When you’ve been hurt in an automobile accident, you tend to focus exclusively on your physical injuries, such as whiplash, broken bones, and cuts and bruises. Most people don’t think about the potential mental or emotional consequences of a collision. Still, the reality is that many people suffer some level of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to a motor vehicle crash.
What Is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is a psychological disorder typically triggered by involvement in or observing a traumatic, frightening, or life-threatening event. It’s often associated with soldiers, but it can affect anyone who has seen or been part of a traumatic event, whether a serious accident, dog bite or animal attack, sexual assault, or public act of violence.
How Do You Know If You Are Suffering from PTSD?
The telltale signs of PTSD can appear suddenly or may take months or years to develop fully. The common indicators of PTSD include:
- Headaches
- Emotional changes, such as increased anxiety, depression, or paranoia
- Interference with sleep patterns
- Nightmares or flashbacks to the event that triggered PTSD
- Avoidance behaviors specifically related to the event or activity that caused the PTSD
- Guilt or irritability
What Is Trauma Therapy?
Trauma therapy is a specialized treatment that focuses on how any type of traumatic experience, including a motor vehicle accident, affects the victim’s mental, behavioral, emotional, and physical health. Trauma-focused therapy assumes a connection between traumatic events and your emotional and behavioral responses. It typically helps you create strategies, techniques, and skills to help you cope with and respond to the emotions or memories of a specific traumatic event. The ultimate objective of trauma therapy is to help you develop tools to avoid continual retraumatization.
Some of the benefits of trauma therapy are as follows:
- You learn more about trauma, including the normal responses of your mind and body to trauma, so you can anticipate behaviors.
- You start to recognize triggers so that you can either avoid them or find ways to cope with them effectively.
- You establish a response regimen for safely and effectively dealing with the symptoms and triggers of PTSD.
