Symptoms
Stress …show more content…
Often portrayed in movies, flashbacks and nightmares are PTSD episodes. These episodes are commonly depicted of reliving the traumatic event vividly. Flashbacks may be triggered by an object or situation, which can reanimate the traumatic event within the victim’s memory (American Psychology Association, 2013). Not only are nightmares symptoms of PTSD but nightmares are also a factor that causes another symptom—insomnia. According to Vandrey, Babson, Herrmann, and Bonn-Miller (2014), 70%-87% of people with PTSD experience insomnia, and up to 88% had presently experienced or actively experience nightmares. This shows that insomnia and nightmares are a core symptom seen throughout all PTSD …show more content…
The issue with PTSD is that, as certain conditioned responses are extinguished, some responses do not go through the extinction process—depending on the severity of the traumatic event—and cause victims to re-experience the trauma mentally for a prolonged time. As memory can be recalled through many contexts, the extinction process must affect all contexts in order to prevent the development of PTSD (VanElzakker, Dahlgren, David, Dubois, &