Category: PTSD

What Happens to Those Who Survive School Shootings?

Another week, another school shooting. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida is the eighth school shooting resulting in death or injury this year, yet we have only completed seven weeks. It is, according to the Gun Violence Archive, the 1,607th mass shooting since the rampage of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, widely thought to have been the country’s best hope at changing gun control laws.

It didn’t. And gun violence in schools continues.

But in the midst of the gun control debate, it can be easy to forget that there are humans—often children—who have borne witness to terrifying nightmarish scenes that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. What will happen to them?

While much research has been done into the minds and motives of mass shooters, the psychology of school shooting survivors is in its infancy—though the rate and increasing population of subjects means that it is a burgeoning field. According to The Washington Post, there are more than 150,000 school shooting survivors since the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, considered to be the first of modern school mass shootings.

What Happens to Those Who Survive School Shootings?

Playing Tetris can reduce the onset of PTSD after trauma, study shows – CNN.com

After experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event, such as a car accident, people are likely to develop anxiety or distress in relation to that event soon after the experience, leading to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

But a new study has shown that playing the computer game Tetris within hours of experiencing trauma can prevent those feelings from taking over your mind.
PTSD occurs when intrusive memories linked to fear from a traumatic event become consolidated in a person’s mind by them visualizing the event in a loop until it becomes locked in their brain.
Competing with the visualization, such as with a game like Tetris, can block that consolidation form happening.

Playing Tetris can reduce the onset of PTSD after trauma, study shows – CNN.com

Response to PTSD Treatment Associated With Size of Hippocampus

The study, from researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), was published online in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging on May 4, 2016.

Previous research has shown that having a smaller hippocampus is associated with increased risk of PTSD. In this study, the researchers examined the relationship between hippocampus volume, measured with MRI, and response to treatment in 50 participants with PTSD and 36 trauma-exposed healthy controls. The participants were evaluated at baseline and after 10 weeks, during which time the PTSD group had prolonged exposure therapy, a type of cognitive behavioral therapy that has been shown to help patients with PTSD discriminate between real and imagined trauma.

The study found that patients with PTSD who responded to treatment had greater hippocampal volume at the beginning of the study than non-responders to treatment.

The findings add to growing evidence that the hippocampus is key to distinguishing between cues that signal safety and those that signal threat.

“If replicated, these findings have important implications for screening and treating patients who have been exposed to trauma,” noted Yuval Neria, PhD, professor of medical psychology at CUMC, director of the PTSD Program at NYSPI, and senior author of the paper. “For example, new recruits for military service may be scanned before an assignment to determine whether they are capable of dealing with the expected stress and trauma. Having a smaller hippocampus may be a contraindication for prolonged exposure to trauma.”

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