What is PTSD?

Gateway Criteria

The person affected must have been exposed to a traumatic event, such as a car accident, which involved actual or threatened death or serious injury or a threat to the physical integrity of that person or another. Additionally the person’s response at the time must have involved fear, helplessness or horror. Unless these gateway criteria are fulfilled a diagnosis of PTSD is not sustainable.

Apart from the gateway criteria, other symptoms have to be present:

The person re-experiences the event in one or more specified ways

• recurring, intrusive and distressing recollections or dreams of the event
• acting or feeling as if the original event was recurring
• intense psychological distress and
• psychological reactivity on exposure to cues/ reminders of the event (e.g. panic, anxiety)

Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the event and numbing of general responsiveness.

• Efforts to avoid thoughts and/ or activities
• Inability to recall important aspects of the event
• Diminished interest
• Feelings of detachment
• Restricted range of affect (feelings) and/or a
• Sense of foreshortened future

Persistent symptoms of increased arousal. Two or more of the following symptoms should be present:

• Sleep disturbance
• Irritability or anger
• Difficulty concentrating
• Hypervigilance
• Exaggerated startle response

The above three groups of symptoms must have lasted for a month or more and the disturbance has to cause clinically significant distress, impairing social, occupational or other important areas of functioning.