Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A New Profile & Understanding
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is often portrayed in popular media as subjects experiencing hypervigilance, flashbacks, and nightmares.
- "PTSD is highly heterogeneous, yet most diagnostic frameworks and treatment models have historically centered on fear-related processes," says Ziv Ben-Zion, Ph.D., assistant professor adjunct at YSM and assistant...
- For several years, ilan Harpaz-Rotem, ph.D., ABPP, the Glenn H.
Credit: Kindel Media from Pexels
Trauma may be even more complex than previously thought. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is often portrayed in popular media as subjects experiencing hypervigilance, flashbacks, and nightmares. While these fear-based symptoms do commonly occur, new research from Yale School of Medicine (YSM) shows another distinct side to PTSD.
“PTSD is highly heterogeneous, yet most diagnostic frameworks and treatment models have historically centered on fear-related processes,” says Ziv Ben-Zion, Ph.D., assistant professor adjunct at YSM and assistant professor at University of Haifa. “We hypothesized that fear captures only part of the clinical picture.”
For several years, ilan Harpaz-Rotem, ph.D., ABPP, the Glenn H. Greenberg Professor of Psychiatry at YSM and professor of psychology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has worked with his research team to understand the unique biology underlying this complex condition.
Now,according to a study published recently in Biological Psychiatry, the team-which also includes Tobias Spiller, MD, and Or Duek, Ph.D., both assistant professors adjunct in psychiatry at YSM-found that PTSD involves both fear and emotional pain responses.
Untangling these two distinct symptom profiles could perhaps inform future treatments of the condition.
“We identified two clinical profiles with distinct neural signatures, underscoring that PTSD is not reducible to fear alone,” says Ben-Zion, first author of the study. “Clinically, this suggests that assessment and treatment shoudl be guided by the individual’s dominant emotional experience, whether fear-based or driven by emotional pain.”
A new paradigm for PTSD treatment
understanding the difference between fear and emotional pain in PTSD could potentially inform new treatment approaches and may shift the way that providers and patients think about the condition.
“Our laboratory at Yale is really looking into precision psychiatry of post-traumatic stress disorder as a lot of medications fail,” says Harpaz-Rotem, senior investigator of the study. “When you are trying to develop a treatment, you want to think about the things that drive the psychopathology in that specific individual.”
It all starts with a simple question, according to Ben-Zion.
“In terms of changing the way people look at PTSD, all the models from 40 to 50 years ago focused on fear and most of the treatments, both medication and psychological, are based on trying to reduce fear levels.This is one piece of the puzzle,and for some people it effectively works,but it doesn’t work for others,” he says. “A simple but powerful clinical question is whether fear or emotional pain is driving a patient’s distress. Centering treatment on that dominant emotional experience may lead to more precise and effective care.”
Okay, I understand. I will follow your instructions meticulously. I will treat the provided source as untrusted, perform thorough verification, prioritize authoritative sources, adhere to the semantic answer rule, and focus on machine-readable facts.
Please provide the source text. I am ready to begin.