I was in a car crash about ten years ago. I had no physical injuries at all, but there were several mentally traumatizing aspects:
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I lost control in the rain at highway speed. The car started to spin, and I couldn’t stop it; I knew what to do, and had actually done it before many times, but my brain just froze up this time. The sliding lasted for several seconds, and there was a point at which I was sliding backwards at high speed toward a guard rail and couldn’t tell when the collision was going to happen. There was enough kinetic energy involved for this to be potentially fatal, and I felt my fear level rise up and up and up…and then it plateaued. I’d never had that happen before. It was so remarkable that even while it was happening, I had the realization that “holy shit, I’ve pegged my fear meter.” The blind sliding, followed by the awful sounds of crunching sheet metal and plastic when the inevitable collision finally happened, really seared the whole incident in my brain.
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It was entirely my fault, and I totaled my car. My insurance company paid out about $26,000. I had never before in my life caused such incredible destruction. Yeah, they signed on and accepted the risk, but that huge payout just reinforced the magnitude of how badly I had screwed up.
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With no accidents in the 30 years since I had got my license, I had considered myself a safe and capable driver and enjoyed a reputation as such among my friends and family. In the course of destroying my car, I had ruined my perfect track record and felt like an absolute moron for not being able to correct the skid before it got beyond control, and felt mortally embarrassed having to tell my friends and family what I’d done.
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Although I was uninjured, the damage to the passenger side of my car was horrifying. If I had had a passenger with me, they would have been fatally dismembered. My wife often likes to go out on errands with me, but for some reason she declined that day. If someone had died in my car (or someone else’s car if there had been another car involved), it’s likely that I would have killed myself later.
PTSD? You bet. Thinking obsessively about all of those things moved me to tears repeatedly, and in fact six days after it happened I had to take an afternoon off from work because I couldn’t stop crying and shaking. It happened again two years later: I was watching an auto race when there was a big multi-car crash, and the in-car camera footage during the replay shows cars spinning out of control just like mine was, with collisions coming from unseen directions at unexpected moments, and all those same horrible crunching noises. And yes, another episode of crying and shaking, and I had to stop watching the race.
It’s been many years now, and the PTSD has mostly faded - but I could probably have benefited from some kind of therapy early on to help manage my anguish.