Possible PTSD after watching shocking videos?

At the time of writing this it’s been almost a week ago that I challenged myself to permanently overcome my life-long fear of shocking imagery showing death.

Last summer I watched a notorious video of a man being tortured to death, and though I initially thought it didn’t traumatise me the following months would have almost daily thoughts about the videos contents reappear in my mind, yet aside from disturbing me they didn’t truly seem to interfere with my psychological well-being. Nevertheless, I wanted to get rid of this sensitivity regardless and so chose to watch the video two more times as a form of exposure therapy. Coming across comments online that argued there are way worse videos, I couldn’t restrain myself from extending this experiment to include these as well.

I looked up these videos the next day and they depicted the most horrific acts of torture i've ever seen, and realising how much this shocked me, immediately decided to repeatedly watch these videos to desensitise myself to them. The least shocking of the two I watched about 4 times, and the one that shocked me the most I watched 10 times in a row. All in all, it may have been 45 minutes to a little over an hour of exposure in total. I don’t want to go into the details for the sake of ensuring nobody looks these up for themselves, but the videos are often recognised to be among the worst gore to be found on the internet.

The hours after this were characterised by a complete inability to concentrate, nausea (extending into the day after), and a feeling of being stuck in a nightmare. Depression, which I virtually never have, set in not long afterwards, perhaps partly as a result of the adrenaline crash. I felt an overwhelming urge to contact friends and family to tell them how much I loved them, which I ended up doing. From this point on I decided to take up breathing meditation twice a day while forcing myself to think about the videos to come to terms with them.

Initially I thought I was feeling better the next day, yet the following days were characterised by symptoms that i can’t help but to read as indicators of something being genuinely wrong. Periods of overwhelming sorrow and demoralisation alternate with almost random periods of feeling basically normal, which both can last hours. My heart feels continuously heavy inside my chest, and a sense of nausea sometimes re-emerges for a while. Surprisingly enough, my appetite has not been significantly reduced and i generally have been sleeping well. However, yesterday evening i almost had a panic attack out of nowhere, something i've never had before. A sudden sense of impending doom, increased trouble breathing, increased heart-rate, and the videos reappearing in my mind. Slow breathing kept it from becoming worse and it eventually ebbed away (with a hint of this feeling returning at night after i tried to go back to sleep after using the bathroom at around 5AM), but i was close to losing control.

This is what inspired me to seek contact with people who might have some insight into the extend to which shocking videos can screw with your brain, and whether the symptoms I’m experiencing fall under a normal response that can be sat out as my mind slowly processes what it has experienced (due to the experience merely dealing with imagery and not with actual lived experience), or are possible signs of something more serious that would require professional help.

(Moderator note: Moved to PTSD- Terry, if you think it doesn't belong in PTSD, feel free to kick this back to Anxiety Disorders, I'd suggest Panic Disorder if you think it don't belong in PTSD or one of its subforums. Edited to add this might also wind up in OCD. Let me know what you think)

Hello and welcome- as noted, I've kicked this over to PTSD- for the time being. The PTSD moderator, Terry, might think otherwise but in the meantime we'll go with your working thread title.

I don't consider myself overly sensitive to disturbing videos- any time YT shows a splash screen warning me the video I'm trying to watch may be disturbing, I grunt 'not likely' and watch it. But then, I'm a grumpy old man.

Having said that...

Hanebo wrote:whether the symptoms I’m experiencing fall under a normal response that can be sat out as my mind slowly processes what it has experienced (due to the experience merely dealing with imagery and not with actual lived experience), or are possible signs of something more serious that would require professional help.

I'm afraid my kneejerk reaction was that I think I'd ask about professional help for feeling compelled to intentionally seek those out in the first place.

I mean, I get it. I think. None of us get off this planet alive. I have a fear of death, I am in the statistically last decade or two of my life and I don't freaking want to be here, I want to be in 1980. But I'm not. I'm at that age where I could literally die of all sorts of things, all at once. I don't like it.

But I'm not going to stick my nose in it, either. I rarely watch anything about end of life because, well, I just don't want to go there. I'm not avoidant- I mean, my funeral is already paid for and I have a resting place, I've had a burial plot since I was in my 20s, because I knew where I wanted to end up. So it's not denial, it's just that I don't see the utility in intentionally exposing myself to something I really don't want to think about.

I also choose not to dwell on the horrible things Man does to their fellow man. I know there are bad people, and I leave it at that and pray I never am near the kind of person that would torture another.

I'm sure there are videos that are shocking enough to disturb me to some extent. But I choose to leave them be. That would have been my choice, but given that the horse has already left the barn...

Panic attacks suck, don't they? I would get them from my twenties up to close to thirty. I was able to (mostly) rid them from my life, by taking the stance that it's a mind game. But for me, it was faced by forcing myself to go to the typical surroundings that triggered them. Which were perfectly innocuous places- the mall, a crowded event, even church. I personally don't know that it's healthy to watch more of those videos. THAT... is going to be up to a professional to say whether ERP is warranted. However, a part of my beating my panic attacks was to decide I wasn't going to let them run my life. I had to stop caring if they happened. From my place, anyway- I have OCD and from an OCD perspective it seems to me that something like a panic attack can be like a positive feedback loop if you let it get inside your head.

Heck, now that I mention it- there are some very OCD aspects to this. Terry, if you think PTSD isn't the place for this, we might consider OCD forum. In retrospect, this is just the kind of thing a person with OCD, and obsessing over gore/snuff/torture, might do. Usually, with a lot of OCD themes, a person will expose themselves to it because they have a fear of 'being into' the thing feared, or being the kind of person that would do the things in the images. The most common OCD theme in the OCD forum, by far, is pedophilia. Someone obsessing over that in an OCD manner will worry obsessively that they're that feared thing, even though in reality they're the furthest thing from it, and they'll intentionally seek out, if not actual CP, images of minors in order to 'test' themselves, while they're hyperaware of every response their mind and body have, and their anxiety will always twist the results to feed that fear. Testing is always a Bad Thing, and it never resolves the obsessive fear. So... if you tell me you have a fear of doing the kinds of things you watched, or that you're even just obsessed and fearful that you're the kind of person that wants to watch those things, then we're moving this to OCD I think. Because watching the videos will in that case be Testing, and a very OCD kind of thing to do. People with OCD love to 'test' themselves. Fortunately for me, that's a trap I've never fallen into- not consciously, at least. I do have a long history of harm-related intrusive thoughts, but resolve them in ways that don't involve giving into the temptation to 'test' myself with explicit violent imagery/stories. I'm not sure if I've seen a poster in OCD who has Harm OCD, saying they intentionally watch videos like that, or read/watch things about real-life violent crime. Usually, to my knowledge, we just avoid anything that could be construed as a weapon and want to crawl into a hole away from our potential 'victims'. But OCD is a damn clever and imaginative disorder, and I could totally see someone with Harm OCD testing themselves with disturbing imagery.

Barring OCD, however.. I really do think that if you can't bounce back from this, one thing in addition to treatment for the anxiety is going to be looking into what compelled you to intentionally expose yourself to disturbing imagery and concepts. If there's something lying deeper that caused you to do that, then that ought to be resolved so that it ceases to compel you to punish yourself with such videos.