Symptoms Appear Immediately After The Trauma?

It is a familiar misconception that symptoms of PTSD appear immediately after injury. In reality, this fallacy couldn't be further from the truth.

Research to date tends to generally say that symptoms will appear within 3 months of the injury. Do not confuse that as, "I 'll have all symptoms to meet PTSD within 3 months." That's not what I'm saying, nor what current research discusses. The National Institute of Mental Health quotes this exact data.

There's no single authoritative answer to when symptoms appear or how many will show up and when. The most common thought in the subject is that someone may have one or more symptoms within 3 months. Think about it like this -- you may lose sleep immediately, have terrible dreams. That is one symptom, and it'd be natural to experience nightmares and insomnia after experiencing injury. That subsides, after which you may find that you simply isolate yourself a month after -- another symptom. You may have a really hard week at work, then explode at someone. You've never done that after a tough week, but it occurred this once, some months after your wounding occasion. This is another symptom.

All the above are single, isolated symptoms of PTSD. You'ren't experiencing those symptoms concurrently. You experience them as isolated, even seemingly dissonant, occasions. You may experience them concurrently, yet they are still a mere three symptoms of many. This is what most research points to in relation to having symptoms within the first 3 months after your traumatic exposure.

Having PTSD without experiencing the symptoms required to meet identification isn't all that different --on a smaller scale -- from how we experience viral infections. You may get a virus from your child on a Sunday, incubate it for 5 days with no symptoms, and experience the symptoms the following weekend. You carried the virus and were infectious, but how could you possibly know? Maybe you felt a little sore throat as the week wore on or had some sniffles, but it's the right time of year. It does not mean you didn't have a virus, only that you did not meet the telltale signals afterwards get treatment and you'd need to seek help.

On a larger scale, how about sufferers of dementia? Many people who have dementia experience a few symptoms, spread out, for months or even years before realizing there's a real issue going on. They become disoriented or lose their balance. If stress disorders they're stumbling here and there or sometimes being forgetful doesn't set off any alarm bells, the same way that being concerned, of a certain age or on guard following injury is a perfectly non-pathological reaction to recently experiencing injury. It frequently takes more time, and certainly requires more symptoms before discovering you have a persistent issue, even if you do in fact already have the disease to be ticked off.

MyPTSD has polled this precise question for 9 years to further demonstrate the variability for when symptoms start. Our member survey results, those people who have answered, demonstrate that 31% experience symptoms in the first three months, with 49% taking.

Our results show a substantially broader result set taken over 9 years at the time of writing this post. If MyPTSD made a single statement, as other important sources state and the NIMH, then our perspective would be that the majority of folks take more than 12 months to experience symptoms.

This perspective aligns with resilience data (also mentioned by NIMH) that most people exposed to trauma do not develop PTSD, let alone symptoms that would be viewed as a mental health condition. PTSD from a single event is considerably more infrequent than PTSD from compounded wounding occasions throughout life.

In short, the myth that PTSD appears following a traumatic event has little basis in reality. Without developing full blown PTSD sufferers can go years, even decades. The best thing trauma survivors can do is to get help as quickly as possible and build a community around themselves of encouraging, compassionate people that are both honest and understanding. This foundation of support will function as a resiliency tool, and it can be priceless in helping those who experience trauma return to a sense of normalcy. The honesty of others can serve as a check against irrational and uncharacteristic behaviour -- an extra set of eyes to surveil the survivor for hints of a difficulty that is growing. Furthermore, seeking a professional's help following injury has manifold and clear advantages, whether to help mitigate developing symptoms with drugs or merely function as a guide to return to a secure, healthy lifestyle post-trauma.