trauma Archives - Mental Wealth

Cutting off your hair to get through a difficult time is totally normal

Every now and then, a haircut is so much more than routine grooming.

People recovering from trauma—the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, the loss of a job, or our own failing health—will often cope, in part, by changing their appearance. Sometimes, it’ll be subtle, like a new bob or a little retail therapy. But other times, people will feel the need to drastically change their look by doing things like dyeing their hair fuschia or shaving it off entirely.

It’s completely normal to want to superficially change your appearance. “You can consider it a form of self care,” says Christy Beck, a therapist based in State College, Pennsylvania. “You’re doing something for yourself to make yourself feel better.”

After some kind of major stressor, it can be helpful to give yourself some kind of pick-me-up. Although this doesn’t need to be an outward makeover, haircuts, a new wardrobe, or a new piercing or tattoo, can all be investments in ourselves, a way to make ourselves feel better. Stressors tend to emotionally stop us in our tracks; they channel the energy we’d normally expend on our work, hobbies, or chores, into trying to alleviate some immediate pain. Giving ourselves some TLC can be one way to jumpstart our moods to start moving past whatever upset us.

Cutting off your hair to get through a difficult time is totally normal — Quartz

What Bullets Do to Bodies – Highline

The first thing Dr. Amy Goldberg told me is that this article would be pointless. She said this on a phone call last summer, well before the election, before a tangible sensation that facts were futile became a broader American phenomenon. I was interested in Goldberg because she has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, almost all of that at the same hospital, Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, which treats more gunshot victims than any other in the state and is located in what was, according to one analysis, the deadliest of the 10 largest cities in the country until last year, with a homicide rate of 17.8 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015.

Over my years of reporting here, I had heard stories about Temple’s trauma team. A city prosecutor who handled shooting investigations once told me that the surgeons were able to piece people back together after the most horrific acts of violence. People went into the hospital damaged beyond belief and came walking out.
That stuck with me. I wondered what surgeons know about gun violence that the rest of us don’t. We are inundated with news about shootings. Fourteen dead in San Bernardino, six in Michigan, 11 over one weekend in Chicago. We get names, places, anguished Facebook posts, wonky articles full of statistics on crime rates and risk, Twitter arguments about the Second Amendment—everything except the blood, the pictures of bodies torn by bullets. That part is concealed, sanitized. More than 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds each year in America, around 75,000 more are injured, and we have no visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot. Goldberg does.

What Bullets Do to Bodies – Highline

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

To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome

We start with the case of a woman who experienced unbearable tragedy. In 1899, this Parisian bride, Madame M., had her first child. Shockingly, the child was abducted and substituted with a different infant, who soon died. She then had twin girls. One grew into healthy adulthood, while the other, again, was abducted, once more replaced with a different, dying infant. She then had twin boys. One was abducted, while the other was fatally poisoned.

Madame M. searched for her abducted babies; apparently, she was not the only victim of this nightmarish trauma, as she often heard the cries of large groups of abducted children rising from the cellars of Paris.

As if all this pain was not enough, Madame M.’s sole surviving child was abducted and replaced with an imposter of identical appearance. And soon the same fate befell Madame M.’s husband. The poor woman spent days searching for her abducted loved ones, attempting to free groups of other abducted children from hiding places, and starting the paperwork to divorce the man who had replaced her husband.

Nautilus

My family was traumatised first by a murder, then by the TV serialisation

After discovering in 2009 that my beautiful mum, who died in 1991, was in fact murdered by my father and the woman he had formerly had an affair with, I was propelled into a new world of trauma.

Loss of any form is distressing. But the intentional and often violent killing of another brings about a complex grieving process that is interrupted, sidelined and trivialised in favour of a criminal investigation. In a 2011 report of 400 families bereaved through homicide, more than 80% were found to suffer from trauma-related symptoms. When dealing with (or often not dealing with) the impact of murder and the sequence of events it brings about, it can result in multiple processes of re-trauma.

We all love a good crime drama. Yet the reality of murder on the families involved is much more sobering, traumatic and, well, messier than is often projected on our screens. Behind the high viewing figures, whether for fiction or the coverage of real crimes, there are people living with murder bereavement on a daily basis. And an intrusive media experience can often compound this original trauma. If deemed “a good enough story”, private grief becomes public property.

News is important, and when handled factually it serves the public interest. But there is a clear distinction between public interest and what is of interest to the public – the latter is problematic.

The Guardian

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.”

Neuroscience News