PTEs and PTSD - Learn About Potentially Traumatic Experiences - What They Are & How Common Are They?

Let’s now move on to the different types of trauma. Like I said, there’s no such thing as a traumatic event just events that are perceived as being traumatic and there’s a few different types as well so let’s go through each one. There’s single incident traumas so that could be things like an accident, whether it’s motor vehicle, workplace injury, it could be assault, whether it’s physical or sexual. It could be armed robbery. So, these could be single events, that could lead to these traumatic responses from single events. It could also be mass events - things like natural disasters: bushfires, it’s been massive, particularly last year and early this year as well. The floods are also an issue. It could be acts of terror, war.

00:48 - There’s also what’s categorized as complex traumas. These could be things that are considered ongoing. So, it’s not a singular event but they are ongoing things like bullying, whether it’s in school, whether it’s socially, in the workplace, it could be things like torture and abuse as well. Can be an ongoing thing as well, which is really unfortunate, and abuse, categorized not just as physical, it could also be emotional abuse as well. So, very emotionally controlling. Remember that definition about that loss of sense of control? if someone’s very emotionally controlling the, I suppose the victim, would experience a loss of control as well.

So, keeping that in mind, it 01:25 - doesn’t have to be physical. There’s also indirect events. Vicarious trauma, anyone heard of that term ‘vicarious trauma’ before? no? I’ll go into it tomorrow but it’s really, if I can give you an example, it’s where people might work in a field let’s say, sort of medical nurses or emergency nurses, they might come across a number of people who experience domestic violence and they come to them. And over time, even though they haven’t experienced domestic violence directly themselves, because they hear about it through their patients coming through Emergency, over time these nurses might start to believe that there aren’t any good relationships out there. It’s not something that they’ve experienced directly, but it starts to inform their beliefs. That’s considered vicarious trauma. It could be remembering an event or intergenerational trauma and that can be relevant for the indigenous community.

It could be, if we go back in time, 02:24 - the Jewish holocaust victims as well. So, intergenerational trauma is something that’s, I suppose considered complex but also an indirect because they weren’t actually physically present there. Let me give you some numbers on, I’ve noted that the prevalence of potentially traumatic events, and it’s potentially traumatic events because it’s, again, based on people’s perceptions, now you can see that 50 to 75 per cent of people report at least one potentially traumatic event that they’ve experienced. Okay, so that’s half to three quarters of everybody, the whole population, have experienced at least one potentially traumatic event. Okay, but does everyone get diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder? absolutely not! that’s not the case at all! I just wanted to give you an idea of the numbers, 50 to 75 per cent of people.

That’s more than half have experienced at least one potentially traumatic event so 03:20 - you can see in the pie chart there, it ranges from things like having someone close die unexpectedly, witnessing someone killed or badly injured, a life-threatening car accident and other as well. Yeah, there’s lots of different types of events but a lot of people, more than half, so the majority have experienced at least one. Any surprises there? does that seem a bit high more than you thought? Now PTSD: the prevalence of PTSD. PTSD stands for ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ I’ll get into the criteria shortly but, the background of it really comes back from war, when military personnel are at war, obviously horrific things happen at war, right? They didn’t have any symptoms of that low mood or anxiety or that fear, they didn’t have that during war! it was only when they came back after the war finished, they came back home that they started to withdraw they had that emotional numbing, they lost their purpose in life, they couldn’t concentrate, they couldn’t sleep. So, it was all coming back to them once it finished.

04:25 - And that’s why it’s called POST-traumatic stress disorder. Now, the lifetime prevalence. What I mean by lifetime, is not just at this present moment, but over someone’s lifetime between 5 and 10 of people can be diagnosed with this. Compare that to the 50 to 75 per cent of people who have experienced a potentially traumatic event! that’s not everyone, is it? that’s a small minority. Only 5 to 10 people. And, even though people might be diagnosed with it, over half of people recover within the first 12 months. Recovery rates are more than half within the first 12 months! Hopefully that gives you some helpful information but, number one - I want you to have hope that people who have experienced trauma can recover! I put in the picture of the bamboo there because bamboos are very resilient plants, trees, they can thrive and survive in the harshest of environments. I think people are like that as well.

If 50 to 75 per cent of 05:23 - people experience a potentially traumatic event but only 5 to 10 people, 5 to 10 per cent of people are actually diagnosed with PTSD over a lifetime, I think that is a sign of human resilience! [Emi] Hi I’m Emi Golding Director of Psychology for the WMHI We hope you liked the video. If you did, make sure to give it the thumbs up. We have more and more videos being released each week! So, when you subscribe, you’ll get a notification letting you know when a new one’s just been published. So, make sure to hit that subscribe button and don’t miss out on this vital information for yourself, your colleagues, and your loved ones. .