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)
