This treatment was clearly harmful to these very symptomatic survivors, which doubtless would include many of the people at Pulse. Disturbingly, though, the subjects with more hyperarousal symptoms — like anger and hypervigilance — at the start of the study had significantly more PTSD symptoms after receiving emotional debriefing. This is probably because encouraging highly aroused trauma survivors to relive their experience activates the sympathetic nervous system and intensifies symptoms of PTSD, thereby retraumatizing them. Better than debriefing would be the support of loved ones and some basic education about the symptoms of PTSD. When given small electric shocks in a particular cage, adolescent mice learned to associate the cage with the shocks.

Source: New York Times June 17, 2016 12:00 UTC