Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a mental disorder that can develop after a person experiences or witnesses a traumatic event. It has a wide range of symptoms, including flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety, and uncontrollable thoughts about the event.

 Rohit shares how he was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) and how he overcame.

Rohit had been a straight student all along. He had always been a top ranker throughout school. Always a good student, making my parents proud!

But then suddenly, in his first year as an engineering student, his grades fell. From being a top ranker in his class to failing in subjects, his performance was affected a drastic shift.  

Rohit also suddenly realized that I was watching a lot of porn. Every night, he found himself surfing on porn sites and he felt helpless about it. He remembers trying hard to focus on his studies but not being able to. He just kept getting distracted and ending up on porn sites.   

Enter – his psychologist who eventually diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). An emotional condition, that develops in some people after they have suffered from a shock, a loss or a scary experience in their life. She traced his problem back to something that had happened to his family a year ago.

One morning, his elder brother had left home with his camera, on a photography expedition to Sanjay Gandhi National Park and never returned. We found his dead body a few days later in the form of a decayed skeleton. The authorities refused to investigate the matter. This shattered his family and him in unimaginable ways.

He was 18, felt lost, unable to understand what he was feeling. Unable to express what he was going through, unable to understand what had happened to him and his family. He started to shut himself in. This is when his psychologist revealed that he was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). She made him realize how his porn addiction actually stemmed from his trauma and that he was still to reach closure with his brother’s death.   

“Closure – however is a complicated term! It is not a room full of memories that you can slam shut the door on, and get closure. The thing with closure is that you have to accept your loss, express your grief and deal with it rather than just slipping it under the rug” he remembers his counselor telling him.

5 things that helped him deal PTSD, his grief and reach closure with his loss.

1. Write a letter to the loved one you have lost. Express all that was left unsaid, let out emotions that are bottled up inside.

2. A part of Gestalt Therapy is the Empty Chair technique. This exercise needs you to imagine that the lost loved one is sitting in an empty chair opposite yours’. You can now address that loved one and say everything that was left unsaid.

3. You could also write a letter to yourself. If acceptance is key then writing to yourself and pacifying yourself about what happened might help you reach closure.

4. Reading/watching inspiring stories of loss and how people (popular people) have emerged victorious is another way of telling yourself to get over what happened and move on.

5. Remembering your lost loved one, honoring their memory as a family and learning from the mistakes that were made is another way of moving on from the loss. Talk it out or write it down either way, acknowledge grief to be able to get rid of it.

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