Getting PTSD from a seemingly non-dramatic event?

[kukukukukukukukuku]

I’ve always struggled with my mental health, but things have really taken a nose dive right now. I’m off work because I absolutely cannot function, can’t sleep or eat properly (although I force myself to because I’ve lost weight and look awful, almost haunted).

This all started in January this year. I was doing well managing my anxiety and low mood and had just found a lovely new job. On the way to work one day I randomly collapsed in the middle of the road and was taken to the resuscitation department in A&E. I was very agitated and tried to get up to leave and a nurse said “well you can try but you’re at risk of cardiac arrest right now”. I kept asking if I was going to die and I couldn’t feel my heart beating. After the morning spent there, I was given loads of tests and discharged in the afternoon to follow up with GP. So obviously nothing life threatening. Well, I’m still waiting for referrals now because of waiting lists (which I understand because obviously mine is not a priority)

Since this happened I have not left the house once on my own. I hang onto my partner’s arm if we have to walk anywhere, but I will mostly avoid it. I can’t go into busy places where I cannot see an exit, supermarkets seem too stimulating and I end up having panic attacks, I have night terrors and wake up at 3am most nights and struggle to get back off, I’ve lost my appetite and can’t seem to find anything that gives me enjoyment. When I see news stories of people fainting in public it makes me physically tremble and sometimes vomit. I am forever checking my pulse, dizzy and lightheaded.

it’s not just in public either - in my house I will lie down most of the time so I can’t faint, I spend most of my time sleeping to get through the day. Random images of waking up on the floor or all the staff around me in A&E frequently come into my head.

I constantly discuss what happened with anyone who will listen - asking what they think happened in the minutes after I collapsed or whether it is normal to have no warning signs. It frightens me how out of my control it was.

I went back to work the day after it happened and work constantly up to 3 weeks ago when all these symptoms just intensified to the point of being debilitating.

i know it doesn’t sound so scary and I’m almost embarrassed it’s affected me so much, but I feel like I have a genuine physically rooted stress response that won’t go away. I keep saying to myself well it was a one off, nothing bad will happen if it happens, everyone helped you last time. I’ve had CBT but it didn’t really help. I know my behaviours and thoughts are irrational, but when the “panic” strikes in public or even when I’m waking up gasping for air, I can’t rationalise it to myself.

i hate living like this, it’s been 9 months of my life, and no matter how hard I try nothing gets better

That does absolutely sound like something you can develop PTSD from and it would be well worth looking into trauma-focused therapy. Do you have an EAP through work who you can speak to for some advice on whether they can offer anything.

One thing to note, is that previous, early traumas, may not actually be in the conscious part of your mind, and an event like this can cause them, or the feelings associated with them to resurface. I am not saying this to lead you into the suggestion that anything bad happened to you as a child, but to make you aware that things you may feel you have dealt with can resurface in the strangest of ways.

although there are elements of agoraphobia, these symptoms exist wherever I am, particularly when I’m on my own in the house. I have always had anxiety, but this just feels so very different. I feel like I could run out of the house when I think about what happened.

I’ve also developed an awful habit of “hitting the thoughts out my head” so when I think about the collapse or I start panicking about it I get so frustrated that I punch my head. I don’t usually do it around people, but my mum saw me do it the other day and was horrified.

what is most puzzling to me is that this extreme anxiety has only just started - I was working for around 7 months before I couldn’t function anymore. It was always in the background but I could cope. Why is there such a delay in the anxiety response?

What is the source of your anxiety? Is it your job?

I sympathise as I am familiar with this. For many, many years I dealt with stuff (I became an expert at suppressing problems and refusing to acknowledge them and carry on) and then one day went to my GP for sleeping pills as I had stopped sleeping altogether who diagnosed me with extreme stress (highly agitated), signed me off and put me into therapy. I was suffering from severe depression and later learned from my therapist & counsellor that I was being bullied at work by my boss. She'd already started the redundancy procedure a week before I was signed off. My life completely unravelled once I was signed off. I spent 6 months going to the hospital every week to be treated for depression & anxiety.

You need to identify what is causing your problem. A big part of getting better is understanding what's happened to you (sometimes we aren't fully aware) and you'll probably need to change your life completely.

What do you think is causing it? Your body/subconcious is trying to tell you something, hence the breakdown of your mental health.

That’s a very significant experience. Diminishing it might be stoping you from moving forward because you’re sort of in denial about it.

Psychotherapy or EMDR would be what I’d go for. Psychotherapy has really helped me with traumatic experiences and horrible anxiety and panic attacks. Look up Sheryl Paul on anxiety too as she has a great approach that’s honest about acknowledging how scary and precarious life can be. It’s a truth for all of us that you suddenly had shoved into your awareness in a very real and scary way. The fact of life’s precariousness isn’t going to go away, but you can get to a place where you come to terms and more at peace with that awareness, rather than being terrified of it and in denial.

No, the source of my anxiety is the collapse. I had vague anxiety all my life eg worrying too much, but never to this debilitating degree.

I just keep reliving the collapse in my head.

This is a classic trauma response.

This won’t go away by itself with time, or talking about it with a therapist. You need a specialist trauma therapy to reprocess it, so your brain realises you are in fact now safe and the event is over, and moves it into long term memory storage instead of keeping it current. Sounds like your GP isn’t aware of the difference between psychological therapies for trauma vs other issue.

Yes you can experience elements of panic in your house - wanting to run out of your house to escape the feeling. Have you tried any exposure therapy via CBT op as mentioned by pp? I don’t want to out myself but I had a life threatening accident and went through agoraphobia and panic, I thought maybe it was ptsd but it wasn’t, it was agoraphobia.

The only thing that helped was exposure therapy, starting small and then on a scale up. I went from legs shaking in the street and hyperventilating on buses literally terrified to now in a high stress job in a field I always wanted. You wouldn’t recognise me from what I was going through 5 years ago.

I never thought I would get better but that’s how heightened those responses are, they are hellish. It also helped me to just stop caring, as I’m so what if I fall, so what if I see the person that did this etc etc. I’m making it sound easy and I feel like I sound flippant, but it was the hardest thing I did.

I also was always a worrier and magnified worries and I feel this made my initial recovery from what I went through worse.

Also agree with pp, things like this can cause other stressful events from years ago to surface so not all of the response is about the current issue. Sorry this feels a bit jumbled but I just wanted to share my experience in the hope that any of it helps. Sending solidarity

Dr Claire Weekes Book - is what you need to read it has helped me immeasurably with panic disorder. And a lot of what you have spoken about is mentioned in their especially feeling faint when outside.
Please look it up
x

You won't start to get better until you identify the source of your anxiety despite saying you have had vague anxiety all your life. Low self-esteem, social anxiety, these could originate from a traumatic childhood event?

'The collapse' as such are only manifestation of the problem, as are PTSD, agoraphobia, panic attacks, etc. (I developed IBS, insomnia, increasing anger, mania, panic attacks, anxiety, all which I kind of ignored and pushed through over a period of around ten years). The collapse is your body / mind telling you that something is not right and is causing you unhappiness, IMO.

Personally, discovering the cause helped me greatly. I wonder if mental health issues are caused by things in our life which are causing/ have caused us unhappiness and which we are in denial.

If you feel things haven't improved for the last 9 months that could be because you haven't found the cause /aren't looking for it. It's really important to look.

From my own experience, it's like I couldn't see the wood from the trees.

I don't think it sounds like a non-dramatic event at all. Your event is unusual, was traumatic, is still not resolved with an explanation and/or therapy.

I fell down my stairs 18 months ago and thought I'd recovered and got over it just fine. And falling down stairs is a common event. I can think and talk about it and not feel affected by it. The flashbacks, which come out of no-where, started four months ago. I am right back in the moment heading face first to meet hall tiles.

And the reasons why I'm currently signed off with anxiety and depression aren't related at all to the fall. I've just had those moments (and sort of not even acknowledged them - don't know if can now as I will probably look a complete idiot to a GP. Especially since I meant to mention it in my last face to face appointment and got distracted).

Your post and the responses have given me food for thought. Thank you.

"A symptom is a sign or indication of a root cause, but it is not, by itself, a cause. Most often, symptoms lack specificity and are difficult to categorize. It is very difficult to develop solutions to directly address a symptom."

The above is better articulated as to what I meant to write.

It was traumatic though, wasn’t it? You were in a situation that was out of your control and you were scared and were told you might die? That’s absolutely the type of situation that might cause PTSD.

I had PTSD after a traumatic birth experience, which I’d never heard of before - I’d only heard of it in the context of people who’d been in a war zone or were victims of awful abuse. I felt so weak and pathetic that a ‘natural’ event like giving birth could cause my brain to respond in such a way, when other women wouldn’t have been so effected.

Counselling with a specialised expert helped me in the end. The going over and over it in your head, needing to talk about it a lot and being hyper vigilant (anxious, on red alert) are classic PTSD symptoms.

It’s nothing to feel ashamed of - you can’t control how your brain functions and it’s not a personal or mental weakness. It’s a response to something that happened, that was out of your control. Please be kind to yourself and don’t blame yourself. You’ll come through this.

I used to have panic attacks that sometimes resulted in fainting, eventually agoraphobia, general anxiety and depression. No idea what caused the first faint that set it all off maybe just blood pressure or something but that triggered a fear of fainting and everything else that sounds alot like what you are going through.
I want you to know I am now absolutely fine and do not consider myself to have any mental health problems now at all, I've been fine for at least 3 years now and can't imagine myself ever having an issue with it again.
I tried literally everything over the years because I was desperate. I don't want me saying years to scare you more, it wasn't always drastic, I'd have good times and bad times over those years when I wasn't well. What really helped me was when I decided I wanted to start a family so really needed to get in the best possible place and off anxiety meds for this. The things that worked best for me were meditation (headspace app) REALLY commit to it though, don't just fluff through it and expect it to help you, you have to work on it. I also found hypnotherapy brilliant. What worked for me might not be the thing that works for you but something will, I would just encourage you to try everything.
Treat it like a war, be determined, take help from those that want to help you. If you want to talk to me any more about it please feel free to message. It's not easy, you can beat it though.

Ptsd is very complex and takes a while to diagnose. I thought I had that because I had fixating thoughts after an injury but it wasn’t.

PTSD does not take a while to diagnose, it's just that after a traumatic incident there's a watch and wait period where traumatic reactions are considered normal (well to be honest a lot of trauma reactions are normalised months later).

The diagnosis is really simply for PTSD. Not so much for CPTSD or other Trauma Diagnoses but PTSD is basically a check list after a set amount of time, and a chat with a clinician.

That doesn't sound non-dramatic to me OP. That sounds genuinely frightening and I could well imagine not being myself afterwards.

I don't have any useful advice but you shouldn't beat yourself up over it, from what you've said I can totally understand a lasting trauma response.

Gabor Mate (check him out if you've not heard of him) says that:

trauma is not what happened to you, it's what happened inside you when something happened to you. And that's good news because you cannot change what happened to you, but you can change what's going on inside you.

No quotation marks because it's not a direct quote, but it's almost exactly his words.

You can get therapy to help, but please make sure you go to someone actually qualified and experienced.

but please make sure you go to someone actually qualified and experienced.

Yes, this is so, so important. Do check their qualifications and registration status - and do ask locally for recommendations too.

Fundamentally, you’re scared that because your collapse/faint happened completely out of the blue, with no warning signs, or feeling ill beforehand, it could happen again at any time, therefore you try and avoid any situation in which you would be in danger if it did happen, hence staying at home, lying down, holding your dh’s arm?

Most people would feel extreme anxiety about a random collapse, op. I certainly would. If only you could have an idea of what might have caused it, and any preventative measures you could take, I’m sure it would help you to start to come to terms with what happened. Is there any chance you could have private health investigations done to speed things up?

The collapse is your body / mind telling you that something is not right and is causing you unhappiness, IMO.

You have no idea what caused the OP to collapse and it’s dangerous and irresponsible to suggest that what might easily be a physical condition must have a purely psychological cause. Just because someone has mental health problems, that doesn’t mean everything physical that happens to them is caused by that. The OP’s collapse might have been panic related or it might not, but the point is that the hospital clearly said she was at risk of cardiac arrest and there are plenty of purely physical reasons that can happen, so leave the diagnosis to the OP’s doctor.

OP, you have absolutely been through a traumatic experience - collapsing and being taken to resuscitation and believing you might die is not by any standards non-dramatic! You’ve had a frightening experience and this is absolutely something that could cause PTSD - as others have said, there are medication and therapies that can help with this so do try to pursue this, as something separate to the collapse itself.

Take care, and I hope things improve for you soon.

It is entirely normal that you would be suffering PTSD after such an enormous trauma. You stood on the edge of living and faced its end. That’s no lightweight stuff, OP.
And I deeply feel your plight. I collapsed and did end up in cardiac arrest and was resuscitated, so believe me, your PTSD is entirely justified and a normal response to a significant event. That all said, it’s no way to live in fear of death all the time. I know that fear too.
From a really pragmatic and boring point of view, you need to get your heart checked. Make sure there’s nothing amiss there. And if you can’t get it checked on the NHS, try and pay out of pocket for a one-off assessment. At least this way, if something is going on with your heart (you may have an arrhythmia or something else that is totally manageable), you can go back to your regular GP and ask to be referred to cardiology for monitoring.
Get your bloods taken. Take your vitamin D, your B12. Learn to breathe. I do yoga nidra/shavasana (on Spotify) every.single.day! You just lay there on the sofa with a blanket over you and listen into my beloved headphones and breathe. I’m a better woman for it. I was warned by the consultant that the depression and fear resulting from my traumatic cardiac event would be harder than recovering from the actual damage to my heart. And he was absolutely spot on. The mental recovery was miles and miles and miles longer (uphill!) than the physical. Yet in order to physically recover, I needed mental encouragement. A real catch 22.
I would walk alone up my road and back home, 2 minutes maximum, just feeling the sun on my face, and telling myself I was living… ‘as long as I breathe, I live’. That became my mantra. I really learned to breathe (thank you, YouTube universe). I became obsessed with Dr. Gabor Mate who really hones in on trauma and how to release it. Breathing is an essential way of releasing trauma. Movement is an essential way of releasing trauma. Learn to meditate… 10 minutes a day- you and your breath. I listen to Jon Kabat Zinn and this has helped me learn to meditate my own. I now live permanently in a meditative state. It’s my force field. It took 2 years of learning but the healing benefits were immediate. I can’t emphasise how much you should hop on board with mediation/shavasana.
OP, I am so sorry to lecture but I promise you that two things will help you jump this hurdle: learning to breathe through your trauma. And getting reassurance that your health is in a good place. A happy ECG and a specialist who can reassure you that you’re going to be alright (even if you end up having a condition- and believe me, most conditions are totally medically manageable), is invaluable. Peace of mind and deep breathing.
Invest in yourself OP. Get some bloodwork done too.
You are your most precious commodity. Invest in you!
Have a listen to Gabor Mate on YT.
They made a film called The Wisdom of Trauma with him- a documentary. I’ll see if I can share it with you. 💐💐💐

What are you dreading happening exactly? You fainted, the ambulance was called A&E looked after you. likelihood is the same would happen if you fainted again.End of the day you faint, don't make it and know nothing about it. A lot would say that's a good way to die. I don't know, you're not living now so personally I'd try whatever the GP suggests. How about having a phone tracker, would that help going out and about if your family knew where you were?

I've ended up with a very similar response in the past to a far less traumatic medical incident, I think something just triggers and then your response is switched on. I totally second the person recommending Dr Claire Weekes' book (hope and help for your nerves). Despite medication and therapy it was reading that which improved things very quickly. I was so firtunate someone recommended it to me as i feel like it literally saved my life. Also, I had started to have a secondary worry that I was somehow now stuck that way and the longer it went on the longer it would take to recover - not so. You will get back to being yourself, well done for looking for support.

Oh I feel for you. I have had several episodes of PTSD and it’s been exactly as you have described, it goes on and on in your head arghhh.

How we experience something and be very differing how it appears to others. Please don’t worry whether or not your upsetting ordeal “qualifies” as trauma, only you know how it is affecting you.

Upu don’t have to put up with this. I would highly recommend EMDR, it is so quick and effective. Talking therapy helps some people but it is slow, and sometimes talking about it is just more pain.

Take care OP. You can definitely get past this with the right support.

I think it's completely understandable that you feel like you do. It would've been really frightening. Am glad they did the tests on you in A&E.

Can you start with something small like going to stand outside for 2 minutes? Something really achievable. IDK if you have a garden but somewhere like that, or just outside the front door, in the afternoon. Then progress to going outside for 5 mins. Do some gardening/weeding or just stroll around. Then go on a 10 min walk. Don't plan beyond that, just keep it little. Because then you will get out of the house, but not to somewhere stressful like a supermarket. TBH I find supermarkets stressful as it is. They are bright, often have loud music, lots of noise, children, people rushing about. They can be overwhelming. So don't try there. Do you have a favourite place like a country pub, a field, small park, anything like that? For example there is a small park I go to that has a family of squirrels and it is relaxing. I'd try to find somewhere like that and just aim to GO, don't try to stay for a long time, just get there. Good luck xx