Identify Symptoms of Mental Illness

Mental Health Wellness Tips

Overcoming Fears...

How to Overcome Fear of Driving?

How to get Better Sleep?

Effective Assertive Communication

Dealing with Driving Phobia

One of the common consequences of being in a motor vehicle accident is the development of a Driving / Passenger / Pedestrian Phobia. There may be a fear of driving, of riding in a vehicle as a passenger, or being a pedestrian, or all the above. Driving Phobia is an abnormally high level of anxiety and phobic response to road driving, and it can become a severe psychological condition. This irrational fear is driven by our emotions, which is why will-power, facts and reassurance tend to have little impact. Of course, this doesn’t stop us trying to intellectually ‘understand it’ so we examine the past and try to remember or figure out how the phobia developed in the belief that a rational understanding will reduce its impact, it rarely does. This search for an explanation is quite natural – especially when we don’t know any other way of tackling it.

Selfhelp for PTSD

You may have probably noted (link) that there are many symptoms of PTSD, and very few people have all of them. Also, it is normal to experience times of greater anxiety in your life, particularly when you are under a lot of stress. Some of the symptoms of PTSD, such as sleep or concentration problems, for example, are also seen in other anxiety disorders. So how do you know if you might have PTSD? Here are two tips that might be helpful: (1) If you have at least one symptom in each of the major categories, and your symptoms only started after a traumatic event, then you might have PTSD. If your anxiety symptoms were already present before the trauma, then it is probably not PTSD. (2) It is normal to feel more anxious right after a trauma. But over time, these anxious feelings will settle down. Not everyone who lives through a trauma will develop PTSD. But if your symptoms have been present for over one month, and you find that they are interfering significantly in your life, then you might have PTSD.

Identifying PTSD

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can develop after an individual has experienced or witnessed a major trauma. PTSD distinct from Traumatic Stress, which has less intensity and duration, and combat stress reaction, which is transitory. In the past, PTSD has been recognized as shell shock, battle fatigue, traumatic war neurosis, or post-traumatic stress syndrome. PTSD is a severe and ongoing emotional reaction to an extreme psychological trauma. This stressor may involve some one's actual death; a threat to the client's or someone else's life; being in, or seeing, a serious car accident; being sexually assaulted/raped, experiencing long-term sexual or physical abuse; undergoing major surgery (bone marrow transplant, extensive hospitalization, severe burns); experiencing or witnessing natural disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, fire); experiencing torture, a terrorist attack, or being a prisoner of war; experiencing or witnessing a violent crime (kidnapping, physical assault, assault or murder of a loved one); being involved in a war or witnessing violence or death during wartime or threat to physical or psychological integrity, overwhelming psychological defenses. In some cases it can also be from profound psychological and emotional trauma, apart from any actual physical harm. Often, however, the two are combined.

Exploring Anxiety

Anxiety is a physiological and psychological state characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral components. These components combine to create the painful feelings that we typically recognize as uneasiness, apprehension, or worry. When anxiety becomes excessive, it may fall under the classification of an anxiety disorder. Anxiety is a normal reaction to stress. It helps one deal with a tense situation in the office, study harder for an exam, keep focused on an important speech. In general, it helps one cope. But when anxiety becomes an excessive, irrational dread of everyday situations, it has become a disabling disorder. Anxiety disorder is a blanket term covering several different forms of abnormal, pathological anxieties, fears, and phobias. Clinically "fear", "anxiety" and "phobia" have distinct meanings, though the words are often used interchangeably in casual discourse to describe ubiquitous emotions. A phobia is defined as a "persistent or irrational fear." Clinically, fear is defined as an emotional and physiological response to a recognized external threat. Anxiety is an unpleasant emotional state, the sources of which are less readily identified. Distinguishing among different anxiety disorders is important, since accurate diagnosis is more likely to result in effective treatment and a better prognosis.