The symptoms are typically irritability that can't easily be explained.
A kind of belief that no matter what a person does will have no
effect. It can be a sense of hopelessness, a despair that the world
is a very dangerous place and the uselessness of trying. It can
be manifested by fatigue because people can have a level of hyper
vigilance that they are not reporting or obsessive thinking that
they're not talking about going over the trauma again and again
wearing down the emotional and immune system.
For example many people in Oklahoma after the bombing
showed a much higher incidence of illnesses. Concurrently the therapists
treating the victims found a much higher level of serious illness
among themselves by inadvertently taking in secondary traumatic
stress and PTSD from the victims, the environment and unfamiliarity
of this type of trauma.
Likewise, corporate executives and managers are
taking in secondary PTSD by being in a traumatized environment and
that environment today remains largely untreated.
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