Today's Tip
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 PTSD is best mitigated and treated through specific trauma treatment. It is therefore crucial to involve HR and trauma specialists in your emergency recovery plan. One way to attenuate PTSD involves assessing and debriefing impacted individuals soon after the critical incident. The treatment does not stop after the initial debriefing, but rather continues in various forms depending on the type and degree of the trauma. Planning ahead and including trauma specialists in your plan before a
trauma strikes is clearly beneficial to you and your employees.Find out from HR how you can include the right people in your emergency response plan, or visit our website to find out more. |
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Dear ,
In newsletters past, we have discussed many issues and incidents that afflict the workplace. Now we would like to address how those matters can affect individuals and more specifically, their brain.
One does not have to search hard to see large-scale traumatic events occur everyday. Economic recession, war, layoffs, and natural disasters are only a few of the issues our world currently faces. The mental and emotional effects these crises give rise to are expected and observable. But what most forget or know least about are the physical repercussions of these incidents. With advances in MRI technologies, researchers have begun to image the impact of stress and trauma on specific areas of the brain confirming that post-traumatic stress disorder is not a sign of weakness, but rather a disease of the brain.
The implications for the workplace are significant. Businesses must take into account how trauma can affect the quality of work and address the issue directly and strategically. Read more about how trauma affects people and your company in our featured article. For additional information feel free to visit the links provided under Related Resources. Don't forget to post any questions or comments on our new forum!
Best regards,
Vanessa & Wilma
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Trauma and the Brain
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 How do traumatic incidents affect your brain and your work?
Historically, post-traumatic stress disorder was considered a character flaw. It was called "shell shock" in World War I, "combat fatigue" in World War II, and the medical diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder emerged from the Vietnam era. Since September 11, 2001, the impact of trauma on the general population has come into focus.
People often take for granted the very real effects intense stress and shock can incur on the brain. It does not take the daily trauma experienced by police officers, fire fighters and those in the armed forces to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); indeed, a single traumatic event can have a profound effect on an individual and result in this psychologically debilitating brain disorder.
With the advancement of imaging technologies, researchers have been able to detect structural changes in the brains of PTSD patients, including cortical atrophy (degeneration of brain matter) and a smaller hippocampus (a brain structure that plays a large role in memory). Interestingly, researchers are unsure of whether a smaller hippocampus makes an individual more susceptible to developing PTSD or if it is a result of PTSD. Resolving this query may allow doctors to predict a person's likelihood of having PTSD after a trauma.
PTSD patients experience insomnia, nightmares, flashbacks, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, depression, irritability and guilt. Physical symptoms, such as headaches, chest pain or other discomfort, can sometimes be seen in PTSD patients as well. Not only are these symptoms unpleasant in and of themselves, but they also interfere with everyday function - including productivity at work. If an employee experiences a trauma on the job and must return to work at the site of the incident, it may be especially difficult to stay on task and avoid reliving the event. Traumatized employees may make excuses not to go to work and absenteeism will become a problem.
It is vital that you take the threat of PTSD in your employees seriously and incorporate strategies for managing it into your company's emergency plan. Please read our Tip of the Day to find out how to best prepare for PTSD at your workplace.
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, Thank you for taking the time to read this month's Trauma Talk. We hope you have found the information useful. If there are any topics you would like to see featured in a future
article of Trauma Talk, please let us know and we
will do our best to address them. We appreciate your comments, stories,
and thoughts as they will help us further refine and enrich the newsletter in
such a way to benefit you. We recently received this helpful post on our forum from one of our readers regarding the previous Trauma Talk topic of Domestic Violence: "There is a website www.dangerassessment.com
that has a training for assessing danger for domestic violence, along
with a screening instrument that consists of a short series of
questions and a scoring system. The training is very educational and
does not take very long (perhaps an hour) and provides a pretty good
profile of what kinds of situations make for a dangerous escalation. I
am thinking it would be a terrific instrument for HR people to use in
helping employees assess how risky their relationship is. Sometimes
victims are using so much minimizing and denial to survive day to day
that they are out of touch with the actual extent of the danger they
(and consequently their co-workers) are in." Thanks for your input, Gail! Please visit our forum here and respond to questions and post your own advice about this month's newsletter topic or feel free to post other queries and thoughts. We look forward to hearing from you! Until our next talk, stay healthy and take care.
Warmly,
The Trauma Team
Trauma Outreach Associates, Inc.
Phone: 415.772.9999
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In the next issue...
How to develop a critical incident plan
415.772.9999
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