Mark Baxter

What I'm talking about there is things like sexual assault or sexual abuse, violence, witnessing violence, sometimes with domestic violence, but also things like stalking or prolonged bullying, sometimes things like car accidents, near-death experiences, storms, that kind of thing.

So it can be acts of nature, but more often kind of acts of other humans.

And then there's things that kind of veterans experience in war situations or civilians experience in war situations.

And it can also include things like corporal punishment and prolonged fearful situations, especially in childhood.

So there's a huge range of things that might qualify.

But it's really what happened in the experience.

So how that was processed or not processed at the time.

And there's a lot of things that go into how that happens, which we can talk about.

And very importantly, what happens or what didn't happen just after the experience.

So if people go through a really difficult situation, say there's a bushfire, they come close to death.

then there's a lot of community support.

There's the ability to express and to cry.

There's a community situation where everybody's kind of pitching in and there's this kind of mutual understanding of what happened.

A person like that is much less likely to get post-traumatic stress disorder.

There's a way that the nervous system and the psychology of a person

we'll kind of process that in a natural way.

They'll have like maybe post-traumatic stress symptoms for a period of time, a couple of weeks or a couple of months, but that will naturally heal.

So that's normally what happens.

If a person is impacted in the moment in a way that feels completely overpowered,

they can feel completely helpless, they dissociate or freeze, or just after they're not believed or they're shamed or ridiculed or isolated, there's a much bigger chance that the person would go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder.