PTSD

Some people can name the day. A robbery, a road accident, a hospital corridor, a phone call at an hour when phones do not usually ring. Others cannot point to a day at all, because what they are describing went on for years — a childhood, a marriage, a job.

What they describe afterwards is often not the memory. It is the body. Sleep that will not come, or that comes and then breaks at four. A jump at a door slamming that is out of all proportion. A heart that starts running before the mind has worked out why. A stretch of road not taken any more, a hospital not visited, a ringtone changed.

People describe going somewhere else for a moment — sitting in a room with family and being somehow not in it. Others describe the reverse: everything at a distance, as though it were happening to someone at the next table.

And a great many people describe the guilt of still being affected. It was years ago. Other people had it worse. I should be over it by now. We hear that sentence more than almost any other. A difficulty does not expire, and how long something has been carried is not a measure of how serious it is.

It can also arrive late — people describe managing well for years, and then something small unlocking it.

Recognising yourself in a paragraph on a website is not the same as knowing what is going on. This page describes; it does not assess you, and there is nothing here for you to score yourself against.

There is no waiting period you are supposed to observe first, and no statute of limitations on it either.

What a clinician pays attention to is duration and cost. Difficulty that is still shaping days and nights weeks after the event rather than in the first days after it. A life quietly getting smaller — roads, places and conversations removed one at a time to keep the thing at bay.

One distinction matters more than any of these. If what happened is still happening — if you are being harmed now rather than remembering being harmed — that is a different and more urgent conversation, and the options on this page are the wrong ones to start with.

Only a qualified clinician can tell you what is going on — a website cannot. What a page like this can tell you is that the question is a reasonable one to bring, whenever you bring it.

PHC is an assessment-first practice, and trauma is the area where that matters most: what looks like one thing from outside is frequently something else, or several things at once.

1. An initial sessionWe ask what has been going on, for how long, and what it is costing you. You are not asked to tell the story of what happened in the first session. What a clinician needs at this stage is the shape of it and its effect on you now.
2. Emotional assessment and symptom screeningA structured screening of emotional functioning and what you are presenting with, using internationally validated instruments. Its purpose is to decide which further tests, if any, are clinically warranted — you will not be given tests you do not need.
3. A psychologist matched to what the assessment foundPsychologists at PHC are not assigned on availability. Assignment is based on speciality, your presenting needs and clinical fit. For trauma work, being able to say "not that, not yet" and be heard is part of the fit.
4. Therapy, reviewed as it goesPHC's trauma work is trauma-informed therapy, for past or ongoing trauma, and EMDR, which the practice uses for trauma processing and in which one of our clinicians is Level 1 trained. Which is used, and in what order, follows the assessment rather than a fixed protocol. Sessions are 50 minutes, in clinic at our PECHS clinic or in DHA, or online.

• Anxiety
• Sleep disturbance
• Depression
• Trauma therapy
• EMDR