Guys, I'm so sorry you've had to leave early.
Oh, don't worry, so are we.
Maggie hasn't been feeling well for a while.
You couldn't stay for a little bit longer.
No, we really have to go.
Look, if I stay for dessert, you might not be able to get rid of me for the rest of the
night.
It's been great seeing both of you.
You look after yourselves.
If there's anything I can do to help.
Sure, it's been great to see you on film.
Maggie, let's go.
Maggie, keep in touch.
Sure.
Thanks for everything.
I know I said I'd drive, Rod, but I just can't.
Look, I've just about had enough of this.
I'm seeing our whole life just evaporating before our eyes.
You say you can't have anyone around to our house anymore.
Now you can't even stand going to Beth and Phil's.
I mean, they're our oldest friends.
We've had great times together.
Hardly threatening.
Look, ever since your car accident, our life has just become so boring.
And I've got to tell you, I've had enough.
Maggie, you need to get over it.
We need to start living again.
Snap out of it.
Maggie, I'm sorry.
Maggie, we need help.
Maggie is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
It's a condition more common than many Australians may think.
It can happen to anyone through absolutely no fault of their own.
But help is at hand.
Hello, I'm Ross Simons.
This video is about post-traumatic stress disorder.
In it, we'll be taking a look at what it is, how it strikes, and what are the symptoms.
We'll meet some patients who will take us through their real life experiences.
Then we'll take a look at some of the treatments available for people suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder.
You
might have been feeling withdrawn, irritable, unable to manage life as you always have in
the past.
You might think it's all in your mind or that you're going crazy.
Or you might feel it's purely physical.
You're always tired, can't sleep at night, you wake up in a cold sweat from nightmares.
Well, the truth is, it's both mental and physical.
It's very important to realise that post-traumatic stress disorder is a genuine medical condition.
And in most cases, it can be treated.
The information in this video is aimed at helping you understand the problem, its causes,
the symptoms, and the treatments available.
There are easily identified chapter headings on the screen, so you can fast forward or
rewind to particular sections you might want to watch again.
We recommend that you watch this video with a partner, family member, or friend.
That way you can talk about what you've just seen from a couple of different perspectives.
You can talk about what steps you might take if you feel you could be suffering from post-traumatic
stress disorder.
Later on we'll be talking about how family members and friends can help.
Sometimes the biggest step is to acknowledge that something's just not right in our lives.
I hope this video can be a real help in answering some of the puzzling questions there are about
this very real condition.
And then coming up with some very practical help.
The information we'll be covering includes what is post-traumatic stress disorder and
what are the symptoms?
What are the causes of post-traumatic stress disorder and what treatments are available?
And what happens if post-traumatic stress disorder goes untreated?
I would wake, I'd be sweating, fearful, and it was almost like an oppressive, like someone
was squeezing me where I couldn't move and I couldn't do anything.
It was Vietnam.
And it was incidents that happened over there and the way in which we were received when
we returned from Vietnam, issues such as Agent Orange, moratoriums, all those sorts of things.
That's factored off.
I didn't want to be alive, fearful of life.
I wanted to die.
We'll be meeting Marie, Peter and Michael later.
We'll also be speaking with Professor Sandy McFarlane, one of Australia's leading authorities
on post-traumatic stress disorder.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a highly complex but again a very real condition.
It will always be triggered off by a sudden traumatic event.
It then appears that the memory of that event is so deeply imprinted on the mind that it's
unable to be processed or resolved.
Unless it's dealt with, the sufferer may continue to relive that event over and over again and
the fear of it may begin to quite literally take over their life.
They become withdrawn, depressed and unable to face lots of everyday situations.
Here are the most common symptoms of people who are suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder.
There are clearly defined physical symptoms like shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat
or general fatigue, a withdrawal from many personal and social contacts, irritability
or outbursts of anger, a lack of concentration, graphic recurring flashbacks or nightmares
and avoidance of anything that might resemble the initial traumatic event.
People from post-traumatic stress disorder may fear that their entire personality has
been changed.
Not all these symptoms need to apply to you but if several of them do, you might be suffering
from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Professor Sandy McFarland has been treating people with post-traumatic stress disorder
for 18 years.
So what is it?
The essence of post-traumatic stress disorder is that an individual is exposed to a horrific
event and we're not talking here about minor stresses, we're talking about motor vehicle
accidents, being the victim of a crime, being the victim of rape or seeing somebody being
terribly injured or killed.
And most important part about it is the individual gets trapped by the memory of that event so
that their ongoing life is a constant series of reminders that brings back the awfulness
of what they've been through.
And the consequence of that is that the person comes to become very withdrawn in their day
to day life, they can't enjoy activities that normally would have been pleasurable and as
well they get a whole range of anxiety symptoms like can't sleep, can't concentrate, become
very irritable.
Michael fought in the Vietnam War for two years in the late 60s.
Like many Vietnam vets, he returned to the hostility of the anti-war protests at home.
After all the horrors of war, he was overwhelmed by self doubts and flashbacks.
So Michael, what actually sparked your illness with post-traumatic stress disorder?
Well there was no doubt it was Vietnam, it was what happened over there and how we were
received or how we weren't received when we came back.
As researchers you would go into a village and you'd disrupt these other people's lives
and then you might even resettle the village, just pull it down and move them on and here
were these people just trying to live their life.
So what causes post-traumatic stress disorder?
Well to begin with there's no single cause, it always begins with some kind of traumatic
event.
It might be in war, in a car accident or a profoundly disturbing experience at home or
at work.
The impact is so great it begins to take on a life of its own.
Marie was in a shocking and tragic car accident.
As her body recovered her mind couldn't shake the powerful memory of the crash.
She began to suffer flashbacks and terrible nightmares.
Her relationships began to fall apart.
The thing that triggered the post-traumatic stress disorder was a car accident I was involved
in with my uncle.
We were driving along a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.
At night time the vehicle rolled, I had a seatbelt on, he didn't, he was trapped underneath
the vehicle for some time until I managed to find a jack and get him out from underneath
the vehicle and I was there with him for two hours before he died.
Well look I think the first thing to think about in terms of the nature of what post-traumatic
stress disorder is, is that if anybody has a terrible fright or shock we have very powerful
physical responses to that fright as well as having psychological responses and basically
in post-traumatic stress disorder it emerges out of the cascade of the biological stress
response that happens as well as the people's attempts to cope with the fear from a psychological
perspective.
My personality changed completely.
I became very withdrawn, I didn't talk to people, I stayed at home all the time, I wasn't
outgoing, I didn't laugh, I didn't enjoy life.
Post-traumatic stress disorder can strike anyone.
Peter works as a doctor in a hospital emergency department dealing with a full range of medical
crises but it was entirely different when his wife suffered a seizure in hospital after
childbirth.
Peter had to resuscitate her and the shock of it, so up close and personal, resulted
in his own personal crisis.
Look about 13 months ago my wife and I had twins and throughout the delivery of the twins
she actually had a fit and throughout that time it was, the whole situation was very
overwhelming for me and it was really that that sparked it all off.
And you were there?
Yeah at the time when it was going on and I actually had to get involved in helping
it.
How did you find out you were actually suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder?
From the time we went home I knew I had a problem and I just couldn't sleep and I knew
that there was something wrong with me.
So Peter how did all this affect you when eventually you were able to go back to work?
My whole life was completely different.
I really couldn't do anything at work and it was only the people around me that helped
me really sort of guarded me from doing anything serious.
I wouldn't have been able to work at all and if I'd gone on any length of time there I
would have had to stop work completely.
There are all sorts of little things that most people would take no notice of that act
as very powerful triggers to the memories.
I mean an example might be if you've been at the scene of an accident where you've
looked into somebody's eyes as they've died.
What you might subsequently have a great deal of difficulty with is looking into anybody's
eyes because they'll bring back horrific sort of images of that moment of horror.
Diagnosing back into a car was extremely difficult.
I felt very frightened that the same thing was going to happen again even if I was in
a very safe vehicle.
Every bump that we drove over I would get shivers up my spine and start to shake and
feel as though the accident was going to happen all over again and it was uncontrollable.
But there are very real options in finding a way out of it all.
The treatment involves three steps.
The first one is to educate the patient and to try and give them a sense of the link between
their memories and their other symptoms.
Often people are very confused.
They don't sense that there is a link.
The second issue is to try and focus on the psychological reprocessing of the experience
and that involves trying to bring together the actual description of the event with the
feelings so that the person has a sense of control of them through language.
And the final aspect of treatment is the use of medication which is often a very important
way of giving the person a sense of safety.
My treatment began with seeing a psychiatrist and taking antidepressant medication.
After a couple of weeks of taking the antidepressants lifted my mood.
I'd wake up in the morning and feel like I could cope with the day rather than wanting
to stay in bed and hide from the world.
It appears the strength of the memory of a traumatic event can be reinforced by hormones
and neurotransmitters in our brain.
Antidepressants can impact on those chemicals, improving a sufferer's mood, their sleep,
concentration and level of anxiety.
The medication certainly slowed me down and made me have, given me time to think and,
but my times, my appointments with the psychiatrist and my doctor were excellent.
These people are extremely over reactive to the outside world and medication helps by
settling that down and as a consequence the person stops being nearly as anxious and also
their mood lifts.
For most people with post-traumatic stress disorder, when they're diagnosed, life begins
to get much brighter.
The most important thing is to find the right help.
If you suffer in silence or blame yourself, you'll probably get worse as time goes on.
You'll continue to suffer and so will those closest to you and you'll miss out on so much
of what life has to offer.
I think if there's one message that's important about treatment is to try and get people to
get involved in it as early as possible.
Often people try and wait believing that the passage of time will alleviate them of their
symptoms.
But what we know is that in fact the longer they leave it, the more difficult treatment
becomes.
If you're watching this video as a friend or family member of a sufferer, you need to
know that the patient is not just being difficult or putting it on.
What they have is a genuine medical condition, widely known as post-traumatic stress disorder.
There's no doubt that people suffering from it can be difficult to live with, irritable,
anxious and withdrawn.
But there are positive ways in which you can help.
Accept the reality of the condition.
And think it's the sufferer's fault.
Let the patient and their doctor set the pace for recovery.
Be supportive, understanding and encourage them to persist with treatment.
The support and love of my family was everything.
It meant everything without them.
I wouldn't have been able to do it.
I think the first thing that relatives need to know is that people are not doing this
deliberately to themselves.
And it's not about a lack of effort or a lack of self-control.
Telling people to stick the boot up their bottom and basically pull themselves together
doesn't work.
I think to make the relatives understand that this is an illness and that at times that
will have detrimental effects on their relationships I think is an important issue.
I think often if the family can have some sense of what their partner or relative needs,
it can really encourage them to remain in treatment.
Often people find treatment frightening and the relatives I think play a critical role
in holding them and helping them participate in that process.
The good things that they did were they listened to me and I knew that they were there unconditionally.
They may not have understood everything that I was going through but I just knew that they
were there in the middle of it.
Post-traumatic stress disorder isn't something you can tackle alone.
There's no quick fix.
Your doctor can play a very important role in your recovery so we recommend that you
take their advice.
You'll need to talk it all out, probably at length, and after confronting your fears you
can master them.
It's important to say that if you've been trying to avoid circumstances relating to
any traumatic event, please don't avoid follow-up visits to your doctor.
Just like anything worthwhile it's going to take time and effort and making a commitment
to stick to the treatment is part of that effort.
Maggie, Beth and Philly here.
Maggie, you look wonderful.
Beth, I feel wonderful.
I saw the new car in the driveway.
Very sporty.
It's a dream.
I took Rod down the coast for a drive last weekend, just the two of us.
And we had a great time.
Maggie, it's so good to have you back in the land of the living.
Beth, it's so good to be back.
Thanks for everything.
Again, post-traumatic stress disorder is a medical condition just like cancer or heart
disease.
It needs to be treated and it's up to you to get that treatment.
If you do, you'll find yourself on the road to recovery.
The light will begin to dawn again and that'll be good news for you, your family and friends.
If you take one message away from this video, it should be this.
If you think you're suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, do yourself a favour and
do something about it.
If a patient follows treatment, I think they can expect warmth to come back into their
relationships.
Their life won't be riddled by these terrible memories of the past and they can again look
to the future with a real sense of optimism and that they're again in control of their
life.
I'm just being encouraged so much by my GP, my psychiatrist, the medical profession and
all the literature that they've given me.
It's been a great deal of help.
I can just get on my bike now and just ride away into the distance.
It's just fabulous.
I really enjoy that.
I wouldn't have done that before but it's just the encouragement that I've had from
these people that have really lifted me.
So yes, it's great.
Great future.
I think it's very bright now.
I can basically do really anything I want to do and it encompasses my family and my
work now.
I don't think there's anything that could hold me back.
The future feels as if I can carry on.
I can cope with life now.
I couldn't cope with life before but I can now.
Instead of looking incredibly bleak, it's full of promise and hopefully happy days.
This patient educational video has been produced for better health by Roaring, a division of
Pfizer.