Acute stress disorder - Acute stress disorder Symptom, Cause, Treatment

Acute Stress Disorder

• The patient has experienced or witnessed or was confronted with an unusually traumatic event that has both of these elements:
  1 The event involved actual or threatened death or serious physical injury to the patient or to others, and
  2 The patient felt intense fear, horror or helplessness.

• Either during the event or just afterward, the patient experiences 3 or more of these symptoms of dissociation:
  -Feels numbed or detached or is unresponsive emotionally
  -Seems less aware of surroundings, as in a daze
  -Derealization
  -Depersonalization
  -Amnesia for important aspects of the event

• The patient repeatedly reexperiences the event in one or more of these ways:
  -Recollections (dreams, flashbacks, illusions, images, thoughts)
  -The sense of reliving the event
  -Mental distress as a reaction to reminders of the event

• The patient strongly avoids activities, conversations, feelings, people, places or thoughts reminiscent of the trauma.

• There are marked symptoms of anxiety or hyperarousal, such as hypervigilance, insomnia, irritability, poor concentration, restlessness or increased startle response.

• At least 1 of the following applies:
  -The patient feels marked distress from the symptoms
  -They interfere with usual social, job or personal functioning.
  -They block the patient from doing something important such as getting legal or medical help or telling family or other supporters about the experience

• The symptoms begin within 4 weeks of the trauma and last from 2 days to 4 weeks.

• The symptoms are not directly caused by a general medical condition or by substance use, including medications and drugs of abuse.

• They are not merely a worsening of another Axis I or Axis II disorder.
• Brief Psychotic Disorder is ruled out.
• At least 1of the following applies: The patient feels marked distress from the symptoms. They interfere with usual social, job or personal functioning.

• The patient persistently re-experienced the traumatic event in at least one or more of the following ways: recurrent images, thoughts, dreams, illusions, flashback episodes, or a sense of reliving the experience; or distress on exposure to reminders of the traumatic event.

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