The treatment approaches used for posttraumatic stress disorder are:
Prevention
Traumatic events need to be reduced in order to prevent posttraumatic stress disorder. Though the natural disasters are unavoidable and inevitable, the efforts in minimising the risk in adolescents, this could be reduce the frequency of violence in the schools and shootings. The changes which can be made in the law and in social policy play an important role in producing the benefits. The people need to be provided with coping up skills and information to minimise the risk. The cognitive-behavioural techniques are provided.
Treatment
Many people who experience traumatic stress always experience symptoms but the gradually tend to recover without the help of health professional.
• Telephone hotlines: national and local telephone hotlines help people in providing who are suffering from severe stress and for the people with suicidal tendency.
• Crisis intervention: this has emerged in response towards the various stressful situations either the situations might b of natural disasters or family situations which have been intolerable. A crisis-oriented therapy is given to the individual to cope up with the situations that are having ill effects.
• Psychological debriefing: this helps in fast healing process for the individuals experiencing disasters or exposed to various traumatic situations. The individuals are provided with emotional support and encouraged to express their experiences, it is a form of counselling.
• Medications: people experience intense feeling of anxiety or depression, numbing, intrusive thoughts and sleeping disorders, the medications are provided to relive the symptoms like antidepressants. Antipsychotic medications to treat schizophrenia.
• Cognitive-behavioural treatments: in this treatment, the patient is asked to recount the traumatic event again and again till the patient feels decrease in his or her emotional response. This is treatment is used to prolong exposure to the traumatic events to reduce the fear.