S2 E57: Medical PTSD with Emily Parks, founder of POP! Medical PTSD

Written By Eryn Martin

After your brain injury, have you felt scarred by the medical community?  Do you feel yourself pulling away from others, having intrusive thoughts, avoiding medical appointments, having increased anxiety about your health, or having trouble focusing on your appointments? You may be experiencing Medical PTSD.  

In today’s episode we have Emily Parks who is a patient advocate, behavioral health specialist, and founder of POP! Medical PTSD.   POP! provides a safe space to validate your experience and learn more about what others are doing to overcome medical PTSD.  Emily is groundbreaking in developing the definition of medical PTSD and increasing awareness that people can become traumatized by going through the healthcare system or by experiencing a medical event. She gives advice on communicating with healthcare providers and getting through trauma.  Listen today to learn more about this important topic!

In this episode:

  • Emily Parks is a young adult living with chronic illness.  She spent a lot of time throughout her childhood and adulthood in and out of the healthcare system

    • Being in and out of the hospital was very disruptive to life and affected her ability to maintain relationships.  

    • Emily realized in hindsight that interacting with providers within a chaotic system, having providers rapidly change, interacting with insurance, and dealing with all the medical bills led to post traumatic stress

    • The healthcare system has lots of uncertainty and there is no linear path to get healthy again

    • In her twenties she observed herself having trouble maintaining eye contact with people who were physically close to her and tensing up. She realized that this was a trauma response because all her other exposures to people being close to her were healthcare professionals poking, prodding, and assessing her which can be painful and make you naturally tense up

    • Hospitals can be an aggressive environment riddled with communication problems, poking, and cutting.

    • Emily’s own self work helped her to identify that others are likely also struggling with medical trauma leading to the creation of POP!

  • POP!

    • A website and Instagram account for those with medical PTSD

    • POP! Helps validate your experiences and inform others

  • Identifying medical PTSD in yourself requires self exploration and seeking out the root cause of some adverse reactions you may be having

  • When you identify trends in yourself that you want to change, you can break up the behavior you want into small steps.   Give yourself grace if it's a hard day and you can’t.  For example, in Emily’s scenario of being in the dance class and not being able to make eye contact or socialize, she would try to make eye contact once or twice or maybe talk to one person.  She would build time and frequency. It’s like dipping your toe into a cold pool then slowly walking in until you are acclimated. 

  • Communicating with providers

    • Can take raising your voice to an ‘asserting yourself’ level

    • Try paraphrasing the plan back to the provider to make sure you are all on the same page i.e. you are going to do this and call me and I am giong to inform you of this 

    • Think of your provider appointments as a business deal.  Each of you has a part and your goal is getting healthy.  It requires negotiation

    • Thinking of it as business takes the emotion out of it and helps you get the most out of your appointment 

    • Assume that the medical provider wants to help people.  Take the stance of what can we do next? What happened, happened, how do we move on?

    • When going to an appointment, go with an idea of what you are looking to accomplish.  Communicate your goals and needs, listen to the provider, repeat the plan back

    • Both the provider and the patient should accept responsibility for their part of the plan and accept responsibility if something doesn’t go to plan. Be transparent and communicate openly.

    • When the provider or the patient is open in communication, receives validation, doesn’t feel dismissed, and owns mistakes it can help make the experience less traumatic and may open the door for growth 

  • What to do with trauma?

    • Attend a POP! Discussion group.  You don’t even need to talk.  Hearing others' experiences can help validate your own.

    • Talk to a loved one

    • Find a therapist who specializes in chronic illness and/or chronic pain AND PTSD

    • It’s ok to cry.  Crying can be a great release.

    • Attempt to your best ability to reframe.  Think about how situations made you feel.  When you are yelling and screaming it is normally to express that this isn’t fair and that something wrong happened.  Get the crying and yelling out.  Give yourself positive self-talk.   For example, “this isn’t fair, I’m not the bad one” – it is important to get the anger out.  Then try to think about what the good parts are.

    • When you do something you are proud of, give yourself kudos.

    • Build healthy tools

      • Maintain good boundaries

      • Sleep well

      • Eat well

      • Give yourself breaks 

      • Maintain positive self talk

  • Defining Medical PTSD

    • Medical PTSD- a disorder in which a person struggles to recover from experiencing or witnessing a terrifying medical event.  Such events can range from procedures required for survival or communication errors between providers and patients 

  • Classic symptoms of medical PTSD

    • Intrusive thoughts: I’m never going to get better, I’m going to die young, this is my life for the rest of my life

    • Avoidance: avoiding appointments or going to the ED

    • Heightened reactions:fight or flight response

    • Anxiety: going to appointments, receiving healthcare calls, going to the hospital

    • Difficulty focusing during appointments

    • Self-isolation: nobody understands what I am going through or nobody cares so you don’t reach out or you keep your circle very small

  • POP! Discussion groups

    • Happen every other week

    • Topic specific but does have some free form sessions

    • A great place to find support

  • POP! Is ever growing and changing. Interested in helping out, getting involved, providing suggestions, volunteering (especially social media), or partnering with POP!? Reach out to POP! at https://www.popmedicalptsd.org/ 

  • Support us at:

  • Patreon

  • Donate section on our website.  10% of profits go to our favorite non-profit of the moment

Eryn Martin
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S2 E56: A Survivor’s Experience with CBD with Adrian Treadway