June is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Awareness Month. This disorder occurs when someone has experienced a life or death situation, or when knowing that one of our loved ones suffered a traumatic experience. PTSD may cause some of the following symptoms: depression, anxiety, fear, avoiding people or places, nightmares or trouble falling asleep, intrusive memories, irritability, a feeling of insecurity, or lack of confidence. Not everyone who’s experienced a traumatic event suffers from this disorder, but it’s important to know it in order to identify it.
For all the members of the Route 91 family, it’s important to self-evaluate to recognize if there are any symptoms or not. If you identify with one or more of the symptoms, it’s crucial to find professional help with the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center; it’s never too late to ask for help.
Some survivors from the 1 October shooting in Las Vegas haven’t reached out to the help centers and there could be different reasons why—maybe they didn’t have any symptoms at first, or they thought others had it worse and that what they had wasn’t urgent. But as time goes by, our body tells us that something’s not okay. Our brain is another organ that also needs attention and care.
It’s extremely important to know that there are survivors who present symptoms that appear for the first time or that get reactivated (decreased and are resurfacing again) with the recent shootings in the USA. These traumatic experiences reactivate areas in our brain that send alert and danger signals to our nervous system, impacting our behavior. This is why it’s important for survivors and their families to be connected with help centers like the VSRC and to be informed of the symptoms as well as the places where there’s free help for survivors and close family members.