Winter roads: Helping drivers in collisions with trauma, anxiety

With winter now here, the roads on P.E.I. can become slippery and dangerous for drivers.

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If a driver is involved in a collision, the event can have a psychological impact on the driver, including severe anxiety, trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Louise MacDonald, a road safety educator, told CBC News: Compass on Friday.

What kinds of issues do drivers encounter?

Drivers that are experiencing PTSD from a vehicle-related incident in bad weather that's very difficult to get over.

It is often rooted in more serious issues, like inexperienced drivers that are driving in very, very bad conditions that they probably shouldn't be in.

What can happen to traumatized drivers who don't want to drive but don't have a choice?

You want to see a driver at an extremely high risk of a crash, that's one right there forcing themselves to drive under those conditions.

It's amazing the amount of people out there that are doing it.

How do you help them?

Often we start with a conversation about how they actually learned how to drive, and other experiences they may have had that caused them stress in a vehicle.

Maybe as a young child they had a severe scare in a vehicle, or were in a bad car crash, or someone they knew died in a car crash But everyone is different.

Often, my tactic is to take what my driver brings into the vehicle [their skill set] and I work with that.

How else can you help?

Try and establish what is causing the drama or trauma for them and reassure them that this is very real, you don't have to pretend it's not.

Often, it's not about teaching the actual physical part of driving, it's more the cognitive part.

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