People with PTSD often have trouble sleeping and can become emotionally numb, continually on edge or easily frightened, he said. The world will often feel unsafe to them, and annoying memories can intrude on their daily thoughts. Some people may try to avoid things that remind them of their trauma. Teens and adults can turn to substance abuse.
younger children you may experience stomach aches or headaches, Y minor anxiety that causes them to misbehave or have trouble concentrating. They may also engage in “traumatic games,” acting out the trauma they experienced, Dr. Nugent added. If the behavior persists, he said, “then we start to worry that it might be indicating something important like PTSD.”
proximity to violence
Like those who experience gun violence, those who live near it can also suffer.
Dr. Aditi Vasan, a general pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, decided to investigate how children in her community were psychologically affected by nearby shootings after speaking with patients who had anxiety, depression or difficulty sleeping.
“When I asked when these symptoms started, they told me it was after a classmate, friend or neighbor was shot,” he said.
The resulting study, published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2021, examined emergency department admissions between 2014 and 2018 and found that children and adolescents in West and Southwest Philadelphia who lived within four to six blocks of where a shooting had occurred had more likely than other children to use an emergency room for mental health reasons in the two months after the shooting. The odds increased among children who were exposed to multiple shootings and among those who lived closest to the scene of the shooting, within two or three blocks. His symptoms included anxiety, panic attacks, suicidal ideation and self-harming behavior, Dr. Vasan said.
another study, in California, looked at the effects of police killings in various Los Angeles communities. He showed declines in high school students’ academic performance, PTSD-related learning deficits, and higher levels of depression and dropout rates that correlated with how close the students lived to where the shootings occurred. These problems were more pronounced among Black and Latino students who lived near places where Black and Latino people were shot by police.
“Fear trumps the need to connect with other people, and that’s the real tragedy of what violence does to communities,” said Dr. Joel Fein, an emergency room physician at Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, where he co-leads the Center for Violence Prevention.
