Andy Warhol Museum, Hospital team up to help children with PTSD

The Andy Warhol Museum and Allegheny General Hospital have entered a unique partnership to help children coping with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Doctors from the hospital's Center for Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents said they are always looking for ways to help their young patients.

"They get stuck on the experience that they've had and they have a hard time getting passed this so they have nightmares and bad dreams," said Dr. Anthony Mannarino. "They are in their math classes trying to concentrate on doing their math, and they have a bad image of their father beating them or their mother getting beaten."

As with soldiers who return from war, children who suffer from PTSD can suffer from other health problems.

"The PTSD that kids have is the same kind that soldiers have coming back but the trauma they experience can be different," Mannarino said.

One of the ways doctors and the Andy Warhol Museum are working together to help patients is by teaching participants how to analyze and interpret facial features. Experts said they use the lessons to help the children with socialization.

"We actually started looking at facial recognition for children with autism because kids who are on the spectrum have a hard time recognizing facial cues. It's one of the reasons they have a hard time socializing," said Andy Warhol Museum curator Tresa Varner.

The therapy also includes a hands-on studio experience that allows the children to create their own portraits through silk screen printing, digital video and animation.

"You can better express some of your feelings through drawings and painting and so forth than you might be able to do so in words," Mannarino said.

Fearless Journalism: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD

http://www.good.is/post/how-violent-sex-helped-ease-my-ptsd/Journalist Mac McClelland covers the human rights beat for Mother Jones magazine, and the experiences of her profession led to her developing PTSD. Here's her account, for Good magazine, about how it affected her. It's fearless journalism, and not easy to read, but well worth your time:

How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD

Can lowering your blood pressure reduce your nightmares?

Many people with PTSD suffer from nightmares. In fact, it's one of the most common effects of PTSD.

One of the other common side effects of PTSD is high blood pressure, caused in part by the body's constant state of stress and production of adrenalin. Nightmares and sleeplessness don't help, and can make your blood pressure even higher.

But can tackling high blood pressure first help reduce the amount of nightmares you have, and in turn further help lower your blood pressure?

According to this new article at the Huffington Post -- Nightmares In PTSD: Don't Get Your Blood Pressure Up -- the answer could be yes.

The high blood pressure medicine, prazosin, dampens adrenalin's effect on the heart and blood vessels by blocking receptors for the hormone. This old medicine has become the newest approach to treating PTSD. Studies are still underway, but the data thus far show that 75 to 8- percent of PTSD patients who try prazosin stop having nightmares and sleep through the night with normal dreams.

The article is based on research published last year in the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry.

Click through the link above to read more.

The primary, secondary and tertiary effects of PTSD

Bob Trowbridge's article "Secondary and tertiary effects of post-traumatic stress related to war" for Helium (a health & fitness site) does much to illustrate the pains and symptoms of PTSD.

Trowbridge (a spiritual counselor, not a therapist) breaks it down like this:

Primary effects:
Nightmares
Flashbacks
Hypersensitivity
High blood pressure and other physical symptoms
Paranoia
Withdrawal from society

Secondary effects:
The effect on friends and family
The potential for violence

Tertiary effects:
Difficulty rejoining society
Unemployment
Homelessness
Alcohol and drug abuse
Inability to perform in social situations

Trowbridge points out that this three-tiered breakdown of effects is completely artificial. In other words, it's not a diagnostic tool, just a way for us to look at symptom/effects in meaningful clumps that tell a story of the problems PTSDers encounter.

And hopefully, once we understand, proper treatment can begin.

Worth a read.

PTSD & Sleep

Do you have trouble sleeping? Veteran Roy Smith does, thanks to his PTSD. But he has several tips on how to push away the nightmares and get a better night's sleep. Worth a read:

The Effects of PTSD on Sleep

Easing nighmares could help ease PTSD symptoms

Are you plagued by nightmares? Do they haunt your daytime hours as well as your evenings?

A technique called imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT) has been shown to help some people who suffer from PTSD. According to a recent article in USA Today, IRT is "a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses on changing harmful thought patterns."

Basically, IRT teaches you to examine your recurring nightmares, then "rewrite the scripts" so that you are in more control of your dreams.

I actually did something very similar just this past week, without knowing it, to deal with the recent death of my father. Every night before I go to sleep, I try to set the intention for my dreams. My nightmares have dramatically receded, and I feel like my dreams are instructing me, rather than terrifying me.

Give the article a read and talk about this with your therapist. It could be worth a try.