Home > Symptoms of Anxiety > Post Traumatic Stress Disorder > What is Trauma (NIMH)

What is Trauma?

Source: National Institute of Mental Health (extract)

There are two types of trauma — physical and mental.

Physical Trauma

Physical trauma includes the body’s response to serious injury and threat.

Mental Trauma

Mental trauma includes frightening thoughts and painful feelings. They are the mind’s response to serious injury. Mental trauma can produce strong feelings.

It can also produce extreme behavior; such as intense fear or helplessness, withdrawal or detachment, lack of concentration, irritability, sleep disturbance, aggression, hyper vigilance (intensely watching for more distressing events), or flashbacks (sense that event is reoccurring).

A response could be fear. It could be fear that a loved one will be hurt or killed. It is believed that more direct exposures to traumatic events causes greater harm.

For instance, in a school shooting, an injured student will probably be more severely affected emotionally than a student who was in another part of the building. However, second-hand exposure to violence can also be traumatic.

This includes witnessing violence such as seeing or hearing about death and destruction after a building is bombed or a plane crashes.

Source: National Institute of Mental Health (extract)
Added: 3rd of July 2007

Related Links

Coping with Trauma After Violence and Disasters - National Institute of Mental Health Article (extract)

Helping Young Trauma Survivors - National Institute of Mental Health Article (extract)

How Children React to Trauma - National Institute of Mental Health Article (extract)

Looking for help with a problem?... Do get in touch... We're here to help...

If you're looking for help with an anxiety based problem, then we'll do what we can to help you.

There are lots of different ways we may be able to help you to feel better... we'd love to meet you for a chat at one of our practices, or, if you're not near us, there's the LifeShaping Process which is a superb, web based process that you can use at home!

If you're unsure where to start, or would just like to get in touch, just use the contact form below to tell us a bit about yourself, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.