Stress Disorder: The Basics

The aftermath of traumatic experiences in life is often acute stress. When the intensity of the stress booms to inexorable extents, individuals get psychologically disturbed and fall prey to acute stress disorder. Persisting symptoms that extend for more than a month are often characterized as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Stress Disorder – What It Really Is?

It is a mental disorder that is an aftermath of traumatic experiences which can constitute exposure to robbery, theft, smuggling, natural catastrophes, sexual assaults, witnessing a severe and ravaging accident or murder and the like.

Stress disorder sets in either during the period of undergoing the trauma or immediately after the same. Development of dissociate feelings is a very common backwash of such disorders. Rarely, the intensity of the disorder can extend to levels where the memories of the specific events become hazy that the patient becomes a victim of dissociate amnesia.

Acute Stress Disorder symptoms are visible for a period of 2 days to 4 weeks time duration and they should become visible within a 4 week duration immediately succeeding the traumatic experience.

Symptoms of Stress Disorder

The victims of stress disorder often find it tough to enjoy the activities that had proven to be pleasurable to them in the past. They are often stuck with a sense of guilty feeling, which often poses as an impediment to carry out their daily functional routine activities.
Clinical distress is also visible in some cases of stress disorder affliction.

The diagnosis of stress disorder is based on the traumatic experience, the terrifying and shell shocking response that has set in the minds of the individual due to the exposure to trauma.

Numbness, reduction in emotional response, becoming unaware of the ambient scenarios, reification, inability to recollect the critical traumatic incidents are other common symptoms of this disorder.

Miscellaneous Features of Stress Disorder

If the stress disorder is likely to develop into the more potent version namely the post traumatic stress disorder, if the reminiscence of the traumatic event keeps interfering in the thoughts/memories of the individual persistently or if the individual starts avoiding the confrontation of triggers that reminds him of the trauma or if he becomes hyper vigilant and extremely sensitive when it comes to confronting events or people that remind him of the traumatic event.

Common Misinterpretations

Symptoms of substance abuse are commonly mistaken to be symptoms of stress disorders. Aggravation of pre-existing medical health or psychotic disorders should not be misunderstood and mingled with stress disorders.