PTSD Treatments

1. Medication :
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are a type of antidepressant medicine. These can help patients feel less sad and worried. They appear to be helpful, and for some people they are very effective. Chemicals in your brain affect the way you feel. For example, when you have depression you may not have enough of a chemical called serotonin. SSRIs raise the level of serotonin in your brain, causing you less depression.

2. CBT Therapy
In cognitive therapy, the therapist helps the patient understand and change how they think about their trauma and its aftermath. The patient will also learn ways to cope with feelings such as anger, guilt, and fear. The patient might blame themselves for things they couldn't have changed. For example, a soldier may feel guilty about decisions he or she had to make during war. This tupe of thearpy helps them understand that the traumatic event you lived through was not your fault.


By pairing this together, the treatment effectiveness can be very much boosted. Only because medication gets you at the correct mood where you need to be to be able to really apply yourself in CBT, and for the patient to really be able to forgive themselves for whatever trauma they have lived through or caused.




http://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/pages/treatment-ptsd.asp

Talarico & Rubin (2003)

Talarico & Rubin set out to find out the difference between regular ordinary everyday memories and FB memories.

Procedure: They asked participants to recall the events of September 11, 2001- 9/11- on four occasions, 1, 7, 42, and 224 days after the attack, then they tested the partcipants' memory for an everyday event that happened around the same time.

Findings: The FBM's were very vivid throughout the study, same with confidence of accuracy, but they were not more consistent than corresponding memories for the everyday event.

Conclusion: The only difference between them was FB memories were more vivid, and participants' have more confidence in their memories.

Limitation: These tests were questionnaires..








http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2005/04/is_memory_better_for_shocking.php
also, our psychology book..

Neisser & Harsch (1992)

Neisser and Harsch suggest that FB memories are actually the result of rehearsal- dramatic events are likely to be the ones we think of over and over again.

Procedure: They asked subjects one day after the challenger explosion in 1986 and again 3 years later, about the situation that they were in when they first heard the news..

Findings: Subjects reported highly vivid memories but they were often simply wrong, or didn't make any sense..such as being at an event when they heard, when such event was not taking place at that time.

Conclusion: Possibility exists, that this loss of accuracy over time reflects the flexibility and reconstructive power of the mental system instead of questioning the original vividness of FB memory.

Limitation: Loss of accuracy over memories because the memory itself has been gone over too many times causing the memory to have a great possibility of being altered.


http://lhernandez13.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/53/

http://www.brandimontelab.it/pubpdf/abra/Dissociating%20veridicality%20(16).pdf

Flashbulb Memory- Brown & Kulik (1977)

In the study---Brown & Kulik (1977), redefined the way many viewed flashbulb memories.

The aim of the study was the investigate whether dramatic or personally significant events can cause "flashbulb" memories.

Procedure: They asked 40 white & 40 black Americans whether they recalled vivid memories of hearing of major events, such as, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm "X", Martin Luther King, and the day of Princess Diana's death. They tested their hypothesis by comparing non-consequential events against consequential events.

Findings: FB memory is more likely to be remembered for unexpected or shocking event, also personally relevant events.

Conclusion: Events that we place under dramatic or influential cause us stronger held memory of the event.

Limitation: Data is collected through a questionnaire, so accuracy is doubted.

http://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/flashbulb.php

http://www.coursework.info/University/Biological_Sciences/Psychology/Psychometrics/Brown_and_Kulik_and_Flashbulb_Memories_L9731.html

PTSD

PTSD Is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it's an actual disease or illness that affects the victim of this disorder mentally, physically, and emotionally. It is classified under Anxiety Disorders, though Anxiety is most definitely not all it comes with. The people with this disorder live daily differently then us, trying to avoid thoughts and feelings of the trauma that had once caused their suffering now. They tend to avoid place, people, or things that remind them of any of their traumatic experiences, and they are sensitive to things that to other people are normal but to them are treacherous. 
The symptoms of a sufferer include:
substance abuse ( to help take their mind off of the trauma)
a smaller hippocampus
have trouble keeping their realitionships
loneliness
panic- anxiety
emotional problems mostly in general,
sleep deprivation, etc.
The causes of PTSD are :
Any type of trauma
usually life-threatening, or witnessing a severe accident or severe "torture" to another human, being the victim of torture or kidnapping, sexual assaults, rape, murder, exposure to war combat, forms of abuse, etc.


Memory and Emotion greatly relate to PTSD, it is the cause of PTSD. If you wouldn't have had the memory of this traumatic experience then you would not think or care about it. If you didn't have emotion, the memory would mean nothing to you, you wouldn't dwell on it. It would fade away with time, and soon you would forget it ever happened.