I for injury: ptsd is not a disorder

| PTSD is not a disorder, it is a natural reaction.

by Anna Westerberg

There are many prejudices about post-traumatic stress disorder, even among the people who suffer from it. Health professionals often misdiagnose it, and researchers try to find a way to understand it, to prevent it. That way seems to be long still. Will Flint started experiencing insomnia and flashbacks after having been stabbed 12 times with a knife on New Years eve, one year ago. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was something Will had heard of as happening to soldiers coming back from war zones. He never thought it was something that could happen to him.

Will describes the flashbacks as memories of the event shooting into his mind, causing a crippling reaction. Seeing a knife in the kitchen would bring back memories in a shock-like way, resembling an adrenaline rush bringing him back to that night. “For me that was very difficult to deal with,” Will says.

“There’s a misconception that only veterans from the armed forces get PTSD.”

Watch the BuzzFeed ''PTSD Whisper Confessions''

PTSD is a very complex condition. Since the London bombings in 2005 there has been a lot of research on it in the UK. However, PTSD is still widely misunderstood and many times underdiagnosed, leaving the affected person, trying to live an everyday life, with severe symptoms of PTSD, without anyone tracing it to the right diagnose.

Such was the case for Dave, who is named something else but prefers to be anonymous. He finally got the diagnose after having suffered for decades of severe nightmares and depression.

The symptoms are many, not to mention the additional disorders that may follow, such as depression. Sometimes they appear half a year after the traumatic event. The condition is considered even more complicated when the trauma has happened at an early age, or if it went on during a long period of time.

Dave had a difficult childhood which left him with suicide ideation – impulsive suicidal thoughts, as well as nightmares and dissociation where he would tune out as if he was having flashbacks, but his mind was in fact empty. Because he did not have flashbacks he did not recognise PTSD in his own symptoms. “There’s a misconception that only veterans from the armed forces get PTSD”, says Dave.

In his work-life at Refugee Radio, a charity in Brighton supporting refugees, Dave says he has met many people with PTSD who were overlooked by professionals. “We had a man from Turkey, who had all his fingernails removed through torture, going to the doctor’s office for suicidal thoughts and insomnia and comes out with antidepressants.” Dave says the red flag for PTSD should be raised early on for someone with obvious physical wounds, “but time and time again the cases I’ve come across are diagnosed with depression”. Dave calls it a “systematic failure” where PTSD is not being looked for in patients.

Dave was referred to a psychiatrist at a local psychiatric hospital to “see if they could section me”. His GP had diagnosed him with depression and had for years given him antidepressants, sleeping pills and Valium. Dave was only able to function for a few hours a day. The nightmares occurred every night, combined with very little sleep Dave says, “it was difficult to stay sane”.

“I probably would have been misdiagnosed and on medication for the rest of my life, had I not discovered my PTSD.”

The process with getting an appointment with the psychiatrist was slow, and Dave was suicidal and feared he “wasn’t going to make it”. He decided to seek help at a private clinic. He saw a private psychotherapist who suggested Dave’s symptoms were not signs of depression, but in fact resembled those of PTSD. He informed Dave about EMDR-therapy, which has proven to be effective for PTSD. “At first I was very reluctant to accept the diagnose,” says Dave. “I saw so many refugees with PTSD, and I didn’t want to aggrandise what I was experiencing by calling it PTSD.”

When Dave did get to the appointment with the psychiatrist he could push for the treatment he wanted. “I probably would have been misdiagnosed and on medication for the rest of my life, had I not discovered my PTSD”, he says.

“It doesn’t help that PTSD is still referred to as a disorder. An injury is an injury, whether it’s physical or mental.”

Mark de Rond, author and doctor at Cambridge Judge Business School, did research in Afghanistan to understand war-related PTSD. He believes we don’t know enough yet about PTSD in order to give everyone who suffers from it the right treatment, “it’s still quite poorly understood”, Mark says, “simply because it is so difficult to understand”.

Mark has found that the biggest misconception among those who suffer from the symptoms is that to be given the diagnose is a sign of weakness, that there is something wrong with you. That if you were a stronger man or woman you wouldn’t suffer from it.

The choice of words are important to increase understanding, fight prejudice and stigma. “It doesn’t help that PTSD is still referred to as a disorder”, Mark says. He thinks it should be called PTSI, i for injury. “An injury is an injury, whether it’s physical or mental”, Mark says. “Disorder implies that there is something wrong with the person.”

Dave from Refugee Radio says “saying that we have ‘triggers’ make us sound more fragile than we are”.

Mark de Rond also stresses the difficulty to understand what someone else has been through, which adds to the misunderstandings of the diagnose. He says that professionals and researchers looking at someone who’s come back from war might have an inability to have a conversation about it because they wouldn’t understand what these people have been through. “You come back from a very surreal experience and even though you would like to talk about it you know people won’t understand. Because there is nothing like it that can compare.” Mark says.

The lack of understanding was something Dave also experienced. “I honestly didn’t feel supported by anybody, it was the opposite, really. I don’t think anybody understood it”, he says. “But how could they understand?”

Will Flint was 25 at the time of the knife attack. He was a competing bodybuilder and a personal trainer, aspiring to become a professional athlete. The night of the attack he was standing at a cashpoint, when across the street a woman was trying to run away from a man beating her. When Will stepped in to help her, the man pulled a knife and stabbed Will 12 times, puncturing a lung and severing the spleen and diaphragm. The injuries resulted in a paralysed lung, leaving Will with only half of his previous lung capacity, stopping him from pursuing his dream of becoming an elite sportsman.

| Will Flint in the hospital after he was stabbed.

Will never spoke to family and friends about his symptoms. “First of all it’s hard to talk about mental health,” Will says. “I also didn’t think that they’d understand. What I had gone through was different from anything they’d ever gone through, they’d never experienced that kind of trauma.”

Will was referred to a therapist by his GP. To reduce the symptoms Will did CBT and reframing exercises, going back to the memory to identify what was causing certain flashbacks in order to accept them. “I learned how to allow them to be in my mind without having jolt reactions. Over time it became easier.”

UK charity PTSD Resolution, co-founded by Colonel Antony de P Gauvain, focuses on helping veterans who have had PTSD, back to normal life. Antony, who has retired from the army and now works as a psychotherapist, also believes that more research is needed to increase the understanding of PTSD. He says there is a traditional attitude towards mental health among professionals that prevent them from recognising PTSD in patients. Treatment is another area that needs more research, according to Antony.

There is also the mystery of why some people develop it and others do not. “Everyone is vulnerable to trauma,” Antony says. “Factors such as the degree of the trauma and any previous trauma as well as genetic components decide whether or not a person will get PTSD.”

“The biggest prejudice is that PTSD is a terminal disease,” Antony says. “It can be treated efficiently to reduce the symptoms to a level where the traumatic memory can be tolerated.”

Both Will and Dave are today mostly symptom free. “Of course, it never fully leaves you,” says Dave.

“It left me with half a lung, I can’t breathe properly and I can’t do the physical fitness or personal training that I used to do,” says Will. “But I’m very lucky that I survived what I survived. For me that has re-shifted how I view things. You know, I got through that.”

All photos of Will Flint are credited to his Instagram page @outdoorphysique

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