A User's Guide to PTSD, Part III: I Don't Have To Do That Any More

[rachelmanija]

This is Part III of a three-part essay on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: understanding it, having it, writing it.

Part I: What I Did In The War. (Introduction; background; what happens during trauma; what happened to me.)

Part II: What Does A Flashback Feel Like? (My history with PTSD, what it felt like to me, and dealing with other people who

Comments

[andelku]

I did EMDR and found it weird but amazingly helpful. And also great when I feel the creeping hyperarousal or (worse) disphoria coming on. You can break that up by moving your eyes back and forth.

[klwilliams]

I manage my depression quite well now with the techniques you used -- medication (boy, was it hard to start that, and I'm so glad I did), retraining my thinking patterns (which I taught myself to do, to get rid of the constant negative litany in my head), and martial arts (aikido). Mine won't ever go away completely, but it's rarely a problem now.

Thanks for posting this.

[arielstarshadow]

I am so very glad you posted your thoughts on the subject. I can't even begin to tell you how helpful they are for me. Thanks again.

[veejane]

Don't fall in love with your own beautiful suffering.

Oh, thank you. I think that advice applies both to people in the thick of mental illness, and people who are on the outside writing fiction. The number of stories I have read where a character's seriousness or heroicness is determined by how many comorbidities he has --! I would blame soap operas and the melodramatic end of the self-help publishing industry for this tendency, except that it's as old as the hills billowy-shirt king-of-pain garret-starvation-beautiful-suicide poets of the early 19th C. (And probably older, but I only go back to the billowy shirt era in my reading.)

[clodia_risa]

When I was first getting on anti-depressants, my doc made me find out what my mom was on, because it was a better shot at working on me rather than having to switch a few times to find out what would. Again, I know of no research.

[klwilliams]

My mother, father, and I are all on different anti-depressants because the same things don't work for all of us. For one piece of anecdotal evidence.

[tool_of_satan]

I don't think I have or have had clinical depression, but I seem to be affected very easily by drugs with depression side effects, so I heartily concur with that last. Accutane hit me really hard. Zantac less so, but enough to make me stop taking it as soon as I figured out what was going on.