I am writing an article on PTSD this week because I thought it was something important that I haven't touched on a lot in my articles. PTSD is a very serious illness. PTSD isn’t a competition for who had the worst past experiences or who suffered/ suffers the longest. PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be caused by an array of different situations and it’s anxiety that is triggered by something that brings somebody back to a specific moment in their life. This is a serious thing that should not be taken lightly. Symptoms can ruin a person's everyday life and interfere with their way of living in a strong way. According to NIMH, people can be triggered by words, objects, and certain situations usually within the first three months of the traumatic event a person faces.

People with PTSD will get bad dreams sometimes, and they will have flashbacks that bring them back to the traumatic event(s). Sometimes people with PTSD have heart palpitations, sweating, and pop-ups in their head. If you see or know somebody with PTSD, you may see them trying to avoid places, events, some objects, or even sometimes people that bring them back to that time. PTSD also makes people scare easily, leaves them feeling extra tense, can interrupt sleeping habits, gives certain moments of anger or tears, and sometimes people will detach and go off into shock. This illness can do a lot to the mind, and sometimes it gets so bad that people with PTSD won’t remember certain years, months, or days of their life because they block it out, while they may or may not blame themselves for distorted guilt.

If you or somebody you know has PTSD, please click this link. This link has many explanations as to how some people get PTSD and it has information for therapy and treatments. This is important because no two people are the same, but everyone that suffers from this is equal and deserves the treatment and/or therapy that works for their specific need(s). Please keep an open heart and be kind to everyone because 24.4 million people have PTSD and you should be kind anyway, but you never know what somebody is going through or somebody that knows the person you’re interacting with is going through, especially since 60-80 percent of people who have had trauma develop PTSD, so be kind and be aware.