Poverty and violence in urban life literally have the same effects of those living in a warzone. For many it feels and affects exactly like a warzone and in recent years it’s been accepted that some people under these conditions are suffering from PTSD, the same condition that first became hit the mainstream consciousness after American soldiers returned from Nam and faced many problems associated with the illness.

Now, the fact is, many inner city dwellers live with this condition. They have PTSD as a result of trauma, many having violence as a daily part of their lives. Not only do they deal with PTSD, situations that create it are a part of their everyday life. They live in fear, they live without self confidence and respect.

In Chicago the general population has about a 20% rate of PTSD, a high amount it seems! However a recent study suggests that for women on the South Side that number is around 60%, a staggeringly high number.

ChicagoMag.com wrote:

Even in that context, though, something emerged that surprised Burnett-Zeigler, enough that she wrote a report on it, with co-author Sunghyun Hong, that appears in The Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.

“As a part of the assessment for women in that study, we noticed that women were reporting both trauma experiences and meeting criteria for PTSD diagnosis at rates much higher than what we expected,” Burnett-Zeigler says. “In the general population, about 20 percent of individuals who have had a traumatic experience will meet criteria for PTSD. There’s some limited literature to suggest that individuals in low-income, high-violence-rates might have a higher rate, but that’s really an area that has not been explored much to date. This was kind of pointing to substantially increased prevalence in a disadvantaged neighborhood.”

Half the women in her sample self-reported a trauma by the strict definitions of the research—”exposure to an actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual assault,” according to Burnett-Zeigler. Of those women, 57 percent were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and another 13 percent had “subthreshold PTSD,” meaning they had some of the symptoms but not enough for a diagnosis.

It’s a high percentage of the sample having suffered from the kind of trauma that can cause PTSD. Of the 24 women who were able to detail their trauma, nine reported ones that had to do with murder or death—a son who was shot ten times, a father killed at home. Twelve reported physical or sexual abuse.

But it’s a much higher percentage of those who’ve suffered trauma also suffering from PTSD.

“It’s a testament to the high levels of mental health need, as far as depression and PTSD; we also saw a lot of anxiety come up, which can be a symptom of PTSD, and is often [coinciding] with depression as well,” Burnett-Zeigler says.

Read more here.

Image source: http://womenandmodesty.org/no-violence-women/