It may feel like hope is hard to find when you’re struggling with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), but we want you to know that there is hope — a good deal of it.
At the Institute for Advanced Psychiatry, Dr. Diana Ghelber and the compassionate mental health team have extensive experience helping people to move past PTSD to regain their lives and their happiness.
If you’re feeling trapped by your PTSD, read on for some encouraging news about the mental health condition.
PTSD can shrink your world considerably, preventing you from venturing out of your home because of fear and anxiety. If you believe that you’re alone in this, we assure you that you’re not.
More than two-thirds of adults in the United States have experienced at least one trauma in their lives and about 6% of the population will experience PTSD. Of those who develop PTSD, about one-third experiences severe impairment, another third moderate impairment, and the final third experiences mild impairment.
Of course, you don’t wish for others to experience trauma or to develop PTSD, but we want to underscore the fact that there are others who are feeling the same way as you do and experiencing the same symptoms.
PTSD was highly misunderstood and underdiagnosed up until a few decades ago, which, unfortunately, meant that many people weren’t receiving the help that they needed. Thanks to an increasing understanding about the impact of unresolved and lingering trauma, people with PTSD are being recognized, heard, and seen.
Today, we’re better able to identify PTSD and the many ways in which it can impact your mental health, which allows us to help you get the treatment you need.
It used to be that we treated PTSD with psychotherapy and medications, such as antidepressants. While this approach can be effective for some, others still struggled.
Today, we have more tools in our treatment arsenal, such as ketamine infusion therapy and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Ketamine is a drug that promotes neuroplasticity and healthier neural pathways in your brain that can break you out of the trauma cycle. One study found that, “Repeated intravenous (IV) ketamine infusions significantly reduce symptom severity in individuals with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder and the improvement is rapid and maintained for several weeks afterwards.”
With TMS, we deliver mild electrical impulses into specific areas of your brain that help improve the communication between neurons. This improved communication helps you to improve the symptoms of PTSD, such as mood regulation and anxiety.
We recognize that struggling with PTSD isn’t good news on any level, but we want you to know that there are some lifelines that can help you get to the other side.
If you’re concerned you may have PTSD and you’d like to learn more, please contact one of our offices in Granbury or Fort Worth, Texas, for expert diagnosis and treatment.
