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Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

At first glance, combat veterans, battered women, and hurricane survivors seem to be divergent populations, but all have a common trauma experience. If one were so inclined to peer closer, one can see they have similarly been rendered helpless in a situation and must deal with it for the remainder of their lives. While the victim may encounter trauma with a unique personal history and means of coping, and different traumas tend to result in different sets of readjustment problems, a similar and fairly predictable set of psychological and physiological reactions at nearly all times follow. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the term used to classify these severe psychological consequences of exposure to or confrontation with extremely stressful events that the victim considers as highly traumatic. More often than not, such events involve actual or threatened death, serious physical injury, or a threat to physical and/or psychological integrity to a degree that usual psychological defenses are incapable of coping with the impact. [thesis]
Cases of PTSD and its symptoms in soldiers are not rare or unidentified, having been documented all throughout history. An Egyptian physician who described a “hysterical” reaction to trauma recorded the first case of physiological distress in 1900 B.C. Egypt. In 490 B.C., Herodotus wrote that during the battle of Marathon, an Athenian soldier who suffered no wounds became permanently blind after witnessing the death of a soldier standing next to him. Civil War veterans who suffered with emotional problems were diagnosed as being afflicted with “Da Costa’s Syndrome”, which shares symptoms with PTSD, or “soldier’s heart”, referring to PTSD’s emotional side effects. In World War I, “shell shock” described veterans’ emotional problems. Trauma effects became of public concern and professional interest when large numbers of soldiers suffered psychiatric breakdowns in...