ACUTE STRESS DISORDER

The person exposed to a traumatic event that involved actual or possible threat to the physical integrity of oneself or others.

The person's response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror.

While experiencing or after experiencing the event, the individual has at least 3 of the following dissociative symptoms:

1. A subjective sense of numbing, detachment, or absence of emotional responsiveness.

2. A reduction in awareness of surrounding (eg. "daze").

3. Derealization.

4. Depersonalization.

5. Dissociative amnesia (ie. inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma).

The traumatic event is persistently re-experienced in at least1 of the following ways:

recurrent images, thoughts, dreams, illusions, flashback episodes, or a sense of reliving the experience; or distress on exposure to reminders of the traumatic event.

Marked avoidance of stimuli that arouse recollections of the trauma (eg. thoughts, feelings, conversations, activities, places or people).