Signs Appear Immediately Following The Injury?

It's a common misconception that symptoms of PTSD appear immediately after trauma. In fact, this fallacy could not be further from the truth.

Research to date tends to generally state that symptoms will appear within 3 months of the injury. Don't confound that as, "I 'll have all symptoms to meet PTSD within 3 months." That is not what I am saying, nor what present research discusses. This exact data is cited by the National Institute of Mental Health.

There isn't any single important solution to when and when symptoms appear or how many will show up. The most common opinion in the field is that someone may have one or more symptoms within 3 months. Think about it like this -- you may lose sleep immediately, have awful dreams. That's one symptom, and it would be natural to experience insomnia and nightmares directly after experiencing traumatic stress disorder injury. That subsides, and you may find that you just isolate yourself a month after -- another symptom. You may have a really difficult week at work, then burst at someone. You have never done that before after a tough week, but it occurred this some months after your traumatic occasion. This is another symptom.

All the preceding are single, detached symptoms of PTSD. You aren't experiencing those symptoms simultaneously. You experience them as isolated, even apparently dissonant, occasions. You may experience them concurrently, yet they're still a mere three symptoms of many. This is what most research points to in relation to having symptoms within the first 3 months after your stabbing exposure.

Without experiencing the symptoms required to match with analysis having PTSD is not all that different --on a much smaller scale -- from how we experience viral infections. You incubate it for 5 days with no symptoms, may contract a virus from your child on a Sunday, and experience the symptoms the following weekend. You carried the virus and were contagious, but how could you possibly understand? Maybe you felt a bit of a sore throat as the week wore on or had some sniffles, but it's the correct time of year. It doesn't mean you didn't have a virus, just that you did not match the telltale hints later get treatment and you'd need to seek help.

On a bigger scale, how about sufferers of dementia? Many people with dementia experience a few symptoms, spread out, for months or even years before realizing there's a serious problem going on. They become disoriented or lose their balance. If they are of a certain age, stumbling here and there or sometimes being forgetful doesn't set off any alarm bells, the same way that being stressed or on guard following injury is a perfectly non-pathological reaction to recently experiencing injury. It often takes more time, and definitely requires more symptoms before finding you have a continual issue, even if you do in fact have the disease, to be ticked off.

To further demonstrate the variability for when symptoms begin, MyPTSD has polled this exact question for 9 years. Our member survey results, those who have replied, show that 31% experience symptoms in the first three months, with 49% taking.

Our results demonstrate a substantially broader result set taken at the time of writing this post over 9 years. If one statement was made by MyPTSD, as the NIMH and other sources state that is authoritative, then our view would be that nearly all folks take more than 12 months to experience symptoms.

This view aligns with resilience data (also cited by NIMH) that most people exposed to trauma don't develop PTSD, let alone symptoms that would be viewed as a mental health condition. PTSD from a single occasion is considerably more infrequent than PTSD from compounded traumatic occasions throughout life.

In a nutshell, the myth that PTSD appears directly following a traumatic event has little basis in reality. Without growing full blown PTSD sufferers can go years, even decades. The best thing trauma survivors can do is to get help as fast as possible and build a community around themselves of supportive, compassionate people that are both comprehension and reliable. This foundation of support will serve as a resiliency tool, and it can be invaluable in helping those who experience trauma return to a sense of normalcy. The truthfulness of others can serve as a check against uncharacteristic and irrational behavior -- an extra set of eyes to surveil the survivor for signs of a difficulty that is growing. Furthermore, seeking a professional's help following trauma has manifold and clear benefits, whether to help mitigate growing symptoms with drugs or merely function as a guide to return to a secure, healthy lifestyle post-trauma.