T4: Trauma and Stress-Related Disorders

• Stress is the person’s biological and psychological response to adjustive demands from the environment.
• Conflict is a category of stressors which is the presence of two or more incompatible needs.
• Approach-avoidance conflict occurs when there is one goal or event that has both positive and negative effects or characteristics that make the goal unappealing and appealing simultaneously. E.g. marriage
• Double-approach conflict is a choice between two or more desirable goals. E.g. Where to study?
• Double-avoidance conflict is a choice between undesirable alternatives (If you don’t have any desirable choice so you just choose from whatever is available.)
• Pressure is a category of stressors which is a force that requires one to speed up, intensify effort, or change the direction of behavior. E.g. time, demands, deadlines.
• Frustration is a category of stressors which occurs when a person’s strivings toward a goal are blocked or by the absence of an appropriate goal.
• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) describes its setting as exposure to a traumatic event during which an individual experiences or witnesses death or threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violation.
• The diagnosis of PTSD cannot be made until one month after the occurrence of the traumatic event.
• Acute stress disorder is somewhat like a PTSD that was introduced in DSM-IV that occurs within the first month after the trauma.
• In psychoanalytic therapy, reliving emotional trauma to relieve emotional suffering is called catharsis.
• Cognitive therapy is a kind of therapy used to treat PTSD to correct negative assumptions about the trauma--such as blaming oneself in some way, feeling guilty, or both.
• Adjustment disorders describe anxious or depressive reactions to life stress that are generally milder than one would see in acute stress disorder or PTSD but are nevertheless impairing in terms of interfering with work or school performance, interpersonal relationships, or other areas of living.
• If adjustment disorder symptoms persist for more than six months after the removal of stress, it would be considered "chronic."
• Attachment disorders refers to disturbed and developmentally inappropriate behaviors in children, emerging before five years of age, in which the child is unable or unwilling to form normal attachment relationships with caregiving adults.
• Reactive attachment disorders the child will very seldom seek out a caregiver for protection, support, and nurturance and will seldom respond to offers from caregivers to provide this kind of care.
• Disinhibited social engagement disorder includes early persistent harsh punishment that would result in a pattern of behavior in which the child shows no inhibitions whatsoever to approaching caregiver but might engage to depart with an unfamiliar adult figure.