Symtoms of acute stress disorder

ASD is acute post-traumatic stress occurring with a month of the trauma.  It has a number of symptoms in common with PTSD but significant dissociative symptoms are often present.

Dissociation is a kind of ‘switching off’, where your feelings, thoughts and memories are disconnected from each other.  This changes your sense of who you are and the way you see things around you; you can feel the world has changed and is not real.  It’s a kind of defence mechanism that helps people to survive traumatic experiences.

The symptoms of ASD are:

• Exposure to a traumatic event (What is a traumatic event?)
• Either whilst experience or after experiencing the distressing event, the individual has dissociative symptoms such as:

  • numbing , detachment or absence of emotional responsiveness
  • reduction in awareness or surroundings
  • derealisation - a feeling of disconnection from the world around you
  • depersonalisation - a change of self-awareness, a feeling of detachment from your own experience
  • inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma

• The traumatic event is persistently re-experienced through:

  • recurrent images, thoughts, dreams, illusions, flashbacks
  • a sense of reliving the experience
  • distress on exposure to reminders of the event, that can include sounds and smells as well as sights

• Avoidance of stimuli that arouse recollections of the trauma, including thoughts, feelings, conversations, activities, places and individuals

• Symptoms of anxiety or increased arousal such as difficulty sleeping, irritability, poor concentration, hyper-vigilance, exaggerated startle response or restlessness.

• The symptoms cause significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.