Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can affect nearly every aspect of your life, including the workplace. But PTSD workplace challenges are more than just an inconvenience. If left untreated, living with PTSD can impact your work performance, your relationships with coworkers, and potentially even your job security.
Working to address the symptoms and underlying causes of PTSD can go a long way toward resolving these workplace challenges. One of the first steps to take is to understand exactly how PTSD can impact you at work — and what you can do to combat those effects.
Causes of PTSD
When people live through traumatic events, they can experience a number of lingering symptoms and challenges that result in a PTSD diagnosis. However, experiencing trauma alone typically isn’t sufficient to diagnose a person with PTSD. Instead, it’s how people respond to traumatic events that can influence whether they have ongoing mental health challenges as a result.
The number of events that could potentially cause PTSD is endless, but common traumatic experiences that lead to ongoing symptoms include:
- Sexual assault
- Being the victim of violent crime
- Military combat
- Having your life threatened
- Kidnapping or torture
- Loss of a loved one
These dramatic and emotionally intense events are extremely difficult for anyone to encounter. It’s normal to feel a sense of shock, detachment, or fear when you live through them, and even for these emotions to continue for a few days.
But for some people, these events mark a change in demeanor and mental health that can last for months or years. When the symptoms from a traumatic event continue for well over two weeks, it’s likely that you’ve developed PTSD.
PTSD is not a mental weakness; it is your mind and body learning to be constantly aware of potential dangers, even if there’s no danger present. This attempt to protect yourself from these dangers, though, can come at the expense of your own emotional and mental health.
The Symptoms of PTSD
PTSD is a complex mental health condition with a wide range of negative mental health symptoms. In the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the symptoms of PTSD are broken into four main categories:
Intrusive Symptoms
Intrusive symptoms are invasive and unwanted thoughts or memories about the traumatic event. This could include experiencing symptoms such as:
- Nightmares
- Flashbacks
- Recurring memories of the traumatic event
- Intense emotions when reminded of the traumatic event
The nature of these symptoms is that they are outside of your direct control, meaning they can happen at any time and be difficult to stop. This often means that these symptoms can occur at work, which can directly lead to workplace challenges for people with PTSD.
Avoidance Symptoms
Avoidance symptoms refer to people avoiding the people, places, or things that are connected to the traumatic event. This could include:
- Not wanting to talk about the event
- Avoiding certain locations that trigger memories of the traumatic event
- Avoiding people who remind you of the traumatic event
- Trying to stifle traumatic thoughts or memories
These symptoms can quickly lead to disruption in numerous areas of your life. In terms of the workplace, they may lead to you avoiding colleagues, turning down clients or jobs, or simply avoiding building meaningful relationships with your coworkers.
Mood and Cognitive Symptoms
People who develop PTSD often experience sudden shifts in their general demeanor, as well as certain challenges with cognitive tasks. This can include:
- Being unable to experience positive emotions
- Perpetually feeling fear, anger, shame, or guilt
- Detachment from others
- Inability to recall important elements of the traumatic event
- Loss of interest in activities that used to be important
Often, people who have developed PTSD can mistake these symptoms as signs of depression due to the similar set of symptoms. Meeting with a mental health professional can help you make the right determination on your specific mental health challenge and guide you toward the best treatment option for you to see meaningful improvement.
Reactivity Symptoms
Reactivity symptoms are a result of heightened sympathetic nervous system activity in people with PTSD. They include symptoms such as:
- Hypervigilance, or feeling like you are constantly on guard for danger
- Anger or irritability
- Difficulty focusing or concentrating
- Being easily startled
- Difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep
- Reckless behavior
Essentially, people living with PTSD have a fight-or-flight response that is stuck in the “on” position. This can make it incredibly difficult for people to relax, feel safe, or accomplish daily goals without disruption.
How PTSD Affects the Workplace
Workplace challenges are a common consequence of living with PTSD symptoms. Since the symptoms of PTSD are pervasive and invasive, they can affect people at all hours of the day, including in the workplace.
The Role of Each Category of Symptoms
Each category of symptoms can impact your work life in different ways. For example, sitting down at your desk to work could be interrupted by invasive memories of the traumatic event, making it exceptionally difficult for you to focus on your work projects and perform at your best.
Avoidant symptoms can lead you to not wanting to travel to certain job sites or see certain coworkers, as well as impact the relationship you have with your supervisor.
The mood and cognitive changes from PTSD can also lead to debilitating work challenges. People living with this disorder can lose the motivation to excel in the workplace, lose interest in their jobs, and have perpetual feelings of guilt, shame, or sadness that lead to their work quality beginning to suffer.
On the other hand, reactivity symptoms can make a person living with PTSD feel jumpy, lash out at their coworkers or clients, and make impulsive or reckless decisions that endanger their job security.
The Overwhelming Nature of PTSD Symptoms
For many people living with PTSD, these symptoms are so overwhelming that even the most trivial of work tasks become seemingly insurmountable obstacles to overcome. The stress and fatigue of living with PTSD symptoms every day saps your energy and motivation, and taking on new tasks and projects becomes overwhelming.
Essentially, workplace challenges become just another obstacle faced in daily life that adds to your mental and emotional burden. Without finding a way to address the underlying causes of stress and difficulties, people can quickly burn out at work, fall behind on projects, or decide that they simply cannot continue working.
Thankfully, there are several treatment options designed to help people overcome these personal and workplace challenges that can get you back on track.
Treating PTSD
Decades of research have explored different treatment methods for helping people achieve recovery from PTSD. While breaking free from this disorder isn’t always easy, it is possible, and seeking out effective mental health treatment options can be a life-changing experience.
Individual Therapy
Individual talk therapy has been helping people overcome their PTSD symptoms for generations. It is the gold standard of trauma care, with an abundance of scientific evidence supporting its effectiveness at resolving symptoms and teaching clients to build healthier and more productive lives.
A number of different talk therapy styles can help people living with PTSD start taking the first steps toward recovery. This includes therapeutic modalities such as:
- Cognitive behavioral therapy
- Dialectical behavior therapy
- Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing
- Mindfulness-based therapies
Each of these therapeutic styles takes a slightly different approach to helping people overcome PTSD. What you can expect is that individual therapy will help you dive deep into the underlying causes of PTSD, teach you actionable coping skills to better handle your symptoms, and provide guidance and support in living a healthier life in recovery.
It often takes time to build trust with your therapist and start seeing results. But when you find a therapist who fits with your treatment goals, the improvements in your mental health can change the course of your life for the better.
Group Therapy
Group therapy is focused on bringing people with PTSD together to support one another on the path to recovery. While group therapy is led by a trained therapist and facilitator, the healing power of this therapeutic intervention comes from the group itself.
The unique advantage of group therapy is getting to learn from people who have shared similar experiences, faced similar challenges, and come through the other side toward recovery. At times, these are the people who are best equipped to help someone living with PTSD start making progress in their mental health journey.
But there is another distinctive beneficial element of group therapy: being able to do the same for others. When you start making progress for your own mental health, being able to share that progress with others can be healing and serve to enhance your own recovery in turn.
Family Therapy
PTSD often affects the relationships that matter the most. Whether that’s your spouse, family members, parents, or siblings, family therapy can provide a space to heal these relationships and reestablish a supportive network of loving relationships.
Family therapy is designed to help not only the person living with PTSD but those surrounding them as well. When the family comes together to work toward recovery as a group, it can create a strong foundation of support that propels your recovery process and helps mitigate many of the challenges you may be facing.
Medication Management
Psychiatry and medication management take a different approach to helping people achieve recovery from PTSD. By using targeted psychiatric medications, clients in medication management can find rapid and substantial reductions in the symptoms that most interfere with day-to-day life.
Medication management not only helps you start these prescription medication regimens, but also allows you to track your progress with medication treatment, adjust medication regimens as needed, and try out different medication options if you don’t get the results you were hoping for.
This more detailed approach to psychiatric services can go a long way toward reducing PTSD symptoms, managing any unwanted side effects, and ensuring that you have a long and healthy recovery.
Adjunctive Treatments
Adjunctive treatments are meant to supplement the interventions used to treat PTSD directly. This could include finding treatment interventions for co-occurring mental health conditions, such as depression or anxiety, or simply seeking out other styles of treatment that provide a more holistic sense of health and well-being.
Some common adjunctive treatment options include:
- Deep transcranial magnetic stimulation
- Neurofeedback
- Hyperbaric oxygen therapy
These complementary treatment options can help round out a comprehensive mental health treatment plan and ensure that you have everything you need to create a sustainable path to lifelong recovery.
Start PTSD Treatment at APN Lodge Today
APN Lodge provides a comprehensive suite of mental health treatment services for people living with PTSD and experiencing workplace challenges. If you’re not sure where to begin with treatment, contact us today by filling out our confidential contact form or by calling us at 855.934.1178.
References
- Mendes DD, Mello MF, Ventura P, et al. A systematic review on the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder. 2008. In: Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE): Quality-assessed Reviews [Internet]. York (UK): Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (UK); 1995-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK75730/
- Sherin, Jonathan E, and Charles B Nemeroff. “Post-traumatic stress disorder: the neurobiological impact of psychological trauma.” Dialogues in clinical neuroscience vol. 13,3 (2011): 263-78. doi:10.31887/DCNS.2011.13.2/jsherin
