A recent study by Dutch scientists has found that people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may be less sensitive to physical pain than those who don't suffer from the condition. PTSD patients experience panic attacks, flashbacks, anxiety and depression following a traumatic event. Scans reveals that the PTSD subjects' brains were less active than those of their unaffected counterparts.
While other studies have suggested that patients with PTSD may have differences in the structure of certain parts of their brain compared with healthy people, the research team did not suggest a reason for the difference in pain regulation between the two groups they tested.
The study was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Cited story.
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Interesting. People with PTSD often experience an "emotional numbing" with related symptoms of despondency, listlessness, and loss of pleasure. Could there be a physical numbing as well?
With the caveat that I know next to nothing about PTSD, one might speculate that the increased vigilance towards threat information (an established feature of PTSD, I believe) actually causes those with PTSD to temporally discount their current pain, almost as though something much worse is coming later.
Imagine that you are hit by an unseen object, and you fear that more objects may soon be coming at you. My guess is that you will not notice the pain as much as someone who is unafraid of additional flying objects.
My partner has chronic PTSD as well as fibromyalgia, and her first response to this was that the dissociation of PTSD logically leads to a heightened tolerance for pain because during severe pain -- as she puts it -- "[she's] just not there" with it, which is something I can attest to. Further, due to long experience with trauma, she learned over time to use coping mechanisms that most people don't have, and these lessen her experience of pain. However, as she also pointed out, the flashbacks can indeed bring back all the sense of pain that at the time were dissociated from.
i think that physical numbing is a good way to describe this phenomenon, Romeo.
one thing to keep in mind though, is that nearly everyone experiences a traumatic event at some time in their life times, but not all of those people will go on to develop PTSD. those who do develop PTSD appear to have "alternative brain wiring" that predisposes them to suffer from PTSD after an approriate trigger (traumatic event) comes along.
Keep in mind that PTSD has to do with being in a traumatic, life threatening situation where a person perceives s/he is trapped or unable (actually or perceptually) to escape it or be relieved from it. While this can be different for each individual person (what one person is able to tolerate in a given situation may be greater or less than what another person is able to tolerate), it is much more and much deeper than what many people tend to think of as "a traumatic event" that "nearly everyone is likely to experience".
Many very strong people, physically and/or emotionally, can endure much for a long time before the situation becomes intolerable and PTSD becomes the result. PTSD does not have to come from a single traumatic event. It can come from an intolerable, inescapable, life threatening environment, such as where an intolerable event is experienced over and over again. In the experience of people I know, it comes from a situation that lasts for a much longer time than one incident.
While we may all suffer at some time or another from stress or traumatic events, PTSD is different, just like suffering sadness or grief is different from depression.
Chardyspal
good points, Chardyspal.
Ah, you mean a long-term trauma like racial prejudice, or homophobic teasing, bullying, straitened poverty, or shunning? Makes sense.