Psychological resilience after disaster - Essay Example

Analysis H has undergone a lot of stress as a result of the trauma she experienced. Whenever she comes across a stranger, she always has this feeling that the person might be approaching her to blame her and cause harm in response to what she had posted on the Web three years ago. Facebook is such an essential part of our lives in the present age, but my friend has no account on Facebook. Any latest popular topics from the internet we discuss and share with each other upset her. The traumatic experience she has gone through is not only affecting her life now, but has also repercussions in the future. As of now, her social circle is very small. She does not let anyone enter her social circle unless she knows the person very well or the person has been referred to her by someone she knows very well or can fully trust. In the future, she might find it hard to get to know the opportunities of employment or scholarship as social networking has become such an important means of learning about these opportunities nowadays. Most of the opportunities are referred to by friends and colleagues on social media. Be it Facebook or LinkedIn, people use these mediums to post opportunities and connect with professionals in their respective fields that they think can benefit them in some way. It is sad that for H, this setup comes with a lot of risks. The emotional distress H experiences while joining any online group keeps her from participating fully and consequently, she misses out a lot of opportunities. She finds herself vulnerable to fraud, cheating, and blackmailing if she uses these mediums for social or professional causes. H’s ability to stand up for the right has been lost. I know her from childhood and she always used to be a girl who would not tolerate any lies or deceptions. She would do all in her capacity to fix the situations. Her endeavors originated in her belief that with effort and courage, she could change things for the better. Unfortunately now she is no more that sort of person. Now when she notices a problem somewhere, she lets it be there rather than do something to correct the situation. Whenever she feels like doing something to change things for the better, the wounds and emotional scars she received from her father start hurting again and she is instantly reminded of the whole experience she has gone through. Before, she tried to solve the problems. Now, she tries to run away from the problems. This can have dreadful consequences on both her personal and professional life. While there has been a lot of research that has rendered recommendations on how to combat depression resulting from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), more research needs to be conducted to identify ways and strategies using which the sufferers can develop trust and ability to have faith in others. This may be more difficult than to combat depression because losing trust is a damage done on emotional level more than on psychological level. Summerfield (1999) found that for the most part, trauma survivors’ concerns that are related to political turbulence are outward rather than psychological or mental. This imparts the need to place more emphasis on the rebuilding of their lives at an interpersonal and infrastructural level than on mental or psychological rehabilitation. H’s life also needs to be rebuilt at the infrastructural and interpersonal level. Her trust in people needs to be restored and she needs to be provided with a family structure where she can get her emotional, psychological, and physical needs addressed. Kleinman’s (1987) category fallacy notion is important to this argument that suggests that phenomena taking place in different social settings may contain different meanings in those contexts. People that exhibit traumatization symptoms conforming to PTSD in the opinion of Western clinicians may themselves attribute alternate meanings to those symptoms. Analysis of H’s post-traumatic stress also suggests that the meaning she attributes to her symptoms identify more with non-clinical distress than a major psychiatric disorder. Suffering can thus be best understood as originating in a social context so that it is shaped by contextual and local understandings and meanings. Anger is an important part of PTSD’s symptom cluster. Like the South African former detainees that experienced abuse and torture reported thinking about their suffering, and shared that they sometimes experienced flashbacks to the time of detention (Kagee, 2004), H also remembers the whole experience and sometimes has nightmares about the incident. This reflects a sense of unreality in H’s descriptions of her present symptoms just like it reflects in the case of the South African former detainees. H expressed that after going through the whole incident, she was changed as a person in a way that she became easily agitated over petty and insignificant matters. Another commonality between the post-traumatic stress experienced by H and the South African former detainees is that both have seen “at least some impairment in their functioning and quality of life” (Kagee, 2004). In the case of H, this impairment is her broken link with her home and her absence from social platforms in general and from social networking sites in particular. A number of studies have depicted increased likelihood of occurrence of traumatic effects of a PTSD in people that have experienced trauma at an earlier stage in their lives (Breslau, Peterson, and Schultz, 2008). People having psychiatric disturbances might have increased likelihood of recalling negative experiences unlike people that have no psychiatric disturbance and might thus forget those experiences (Kessler, 1997). H’s case provides evidence for this as she developed hyperthyroidism after going through the traumatic web experience that she had developed in her sixth grade as well. Breslau, Peterson, and Schultz (2008) also found significantly higher conditional risk of PTSD in the follow-up periods in people exposed to trauma that had seen prior PTSD compared to others that had not experienced trauma before. However, recall bias in research on the effect of early or prior trauma on PTSD is significant due to the fact that virtually all empirical evidence on the effects of childhood trauma is based on adults’ retrospective accounts. Bonanno et al. (2006) examined the prevalence of resilience in terms of having either no or one PTSD symptom among a large sample of residents of New York area in 6 months after the 9/11 attacks and found the prevalence of resilience in 65.1 per cent of the sample. People highly exposed to the trauma showed less resilience, but even one third of the exposure groups that underwent the most dramatic elevations in PTSD showed resilience. H displays at least three symptoms of PTSD i.e. strong emotional distress while using online social media, hesitation to visit home as it reminds her of the unfortunate events and brings her nightmares, and hyperthyroidism. Having those PTSD symptoms, she does not typically qualify to be included in the category of sufferers that show resilience. H avoids going home. This is a very dreadful aspect of her life, especially in Asian family. Although she has come to terms with it since she has been following this trend for three years now, yet this might have horrendous implications on her life in the future. She might gradually have difficulty to build up and maintain close relationships. Except for her mother, H does not have any close relative that she can trust with her secrets and personal life. She takes me as a very precious link because I am someone who is not blood-related to her and is still trustworthy for her. Nevertheless, she has recovered from hyperthyroidism now and is doing quite well in studies. H might have experienced different kinds of PTSD symptoms because of the fact that she was exposed to severe trauma and thus provides evidence for Bonnano et al. (2006) conclusions that people’s tendency to show resilience is lessened as a result of exposure to severe trauma. This exercise increased my knowledge about loss and trauma. I learned that loss and trauma does not necessarily cause an individual to die or push an individual into serious depression and mental disorders which requires medical intervention. Many people suffering from post-traumatic stress are still capable of doing well in their lives. However, they do require emotional support and psychological counseling in order to be helped with dysfunction in certain aspects of their personal and/or social life. I learned that people that have experienced a traumatic effect in the past are likely to experience the same effect again after experiencing a trauma later in life. Analysis of the case of H suggests that for the most part, it reflects what is already known about loss and trauma in the literature. The interviewee H is good in studies in spite of the traumatic experience she has gone through. She takes care of herself well. Analysis of the trauma she went through and the emotional and psychological it had on H leads to the conclusion that the symptoms H experienced cannot be typically classified as PTSD. She is not depressed to the extent that her ability to make informed and rational decisions is impaired. She is not sleep-deprived, and is not suffering from hallucinations that the victims of PTSD may do. However, she now finds it hard to trust others because her ability to trust and place confidence in others has been deeply shaken by her father. The effects of her lack of ability to trust others are also apparent in her impaired social networking skills. She cannot connect with the strangers on social media as well as in real life like people normally do. H knows that all these behaviors are not aligned with what is expected of a normal girl like her who is otherwise doing great in studies. The fact that she is aware of these symptoms as well as the fact that they have been caused by the traumatic experience she had indicates that she can overcome these symptoms with rational thinking and support of the peers. These are some symptoms that have changed H as a person, but she still lives and thinks like a normal healthy person. Now that three years have passed since the incident, her hyperthyroidism has receded and she has reached resilience with respect to her moods. While the damage that has been done to her family is irreversible, H can certainly be helped with trusting others through psychological counseling and behavioral support. References Bonanno, G. A., Galea, S., Bucciarelli, A., & Vlahov, D. (2006). Psychological resilience after disaster: New York City in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attack. Psychological Science, 17(3), 181-186. Breslau, N., Peterson, E. L., & Schultz, L. R. (2008). A second look at prior trauma and the post-traumatic stress disorder effects of subsequent trauma: A prospective epidemiological study. Archives of General Psychiatry, 65(4), 431-437. Kagee, A. (2004). Do South African former detainees experience post-traumatic stress? Circumventing the Demand Characteristics of Psychological Assessment. Transcultural psychiatry. 41(3), 323-336. Kessler, R. C. (1997). The effects of stressful life events on depression. Annual Review of Psychology, 48, 191-214. Kleinman, A. (1987). Anthropology and psychiatry: The role of culture in cross cultural research on illness. British Journal of Psychiatry, 151, 447–454. Summerfield, D. (1999). A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social Science & Medicine, 48(10), 1449–1462. Read More