Acute stress disorder involves anxiety and behavioral issues that arise within one month after experiencing a traumatic event. Symptoms generally manifest during or soon after the trauma and can arise from incidents such as severe physical attacks, life-threatening accidents, witnessing a murder, or combat situations. A key symptom is dissociation, where individuals feel detached from their emotions or body, perceiving the world as dreamlike or unreal. This may also include poor memory recall of the events, which in severe cases is termed dissociative amnesia. Additional characteristics of acute stress disorder include generalized anxiety, heightened arousal, avoidance of situations or stimuli that trigger trauma memories, and persistent, intrusive recollections of the event through flashbacks, nightmares, or unwanted thoughts or images. If these symptoms continue for more than a month and cause significant distress or impair daily functioning, the condition is then classified as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
