Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes
Police Psychology | PTSD 2: Crash and Burn
by Gary S. Aumiller, PH.D. ABPP
Have you ever had the chance to be in a drunk driving simulation or even play a game on a drunk driving simulator? You try to keep the car on a straight path, but it keeps moving around. Every turn you make for the car is exaggerated and you end up swerving and pretty much out of control down the road. They even have games where
you can add a pint of beer or a shot to the mix and see how hard it is to control the car with the extra drink. Essentially, you feel like you are separate from the vehicle, and the vehicle is doing whatever it wants. Until you crash and burn at the end. You almost always crash and burn or else there was no lesson taught.
When you have PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), it is very much like being the driver in one of those simulators. You can usually control the directions, but the magnitude of the response is often not connected to the action you thought you made. Your emotions and feeling seem almost not linked to the events that are happening. It weird when you go from calm to angry in a matter of seconds or you go from smiling to crying because someone got a “A” on their report card in a kid’s movie that your child was watching on the Disney channel. There’s a name for all this, of course, us doctors give names for anything and everything. But the name is not as important to understand as the problems this can cause, the fact that it is normal and how to get rid of it! (more…)
during a physical exam you have high blood pressure or high cholesterol. You may find you can’t sleep at night. You are more irritable and moody than ever before. You are breathing heavily. Your heart rate is through the roof. You are constantly nervous. You worry about everything. You don’t want to make a mistake. Everyone is watching your every move. That’s how I ended up on the floor!
Okay, now what else, I’m still hungry. How about those potato chips? There less than a third of the bag. Let me eat those. I’ll keep looking through here. Hello, a slice of old pizza! That is a piece of heaven. Let me just eat you, you poor little neglected pizza right now. I love cold pizza, wait, is that the chicken parm from Tuesday? Hell, if someone doesn’t eat that it is going to be bad tomorrow. I could go for some chicken parm, after all my wife is making salmon cakes tonight and I never liked salmon cakes, and I didn’t have much lunch, and man this is good! Now where was that chocolate? Ahh, I think I see chocolate – nah, just Cocoa Puffs. Well that is chocolate flavored, let me take a handful of that. Wait, there’s the chocolate. Mmm, nothing like the real thing. SLAM. The front door opens.
open heart surgery, a guy who went through a shooting and explosion, I am a lucky guy to see so much of one kind of case at one time, I guess. All have been depressed, questioning the meaning of life, think life is unfair, all have anxiety, and all have balance problems. You might literally say my patients are bouncing off the walls, as sometimes they are walking like they are on a ship in a rolling sea down my narrow hallways.