PTSD

“From the discovery of traumatic neurosis at the end of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, the psychological reaction was not explained solely as the consequence of the event. The personality of the victims themselves was always questioned. During World War I, especially in the German and Austrian armies, soldiers with traumatic neurosis were systematically suspected of simulation or of weakness and lack of moral fiber (Brunner 200). . . . The pathology was not considered to be the consequence of an event outside the range of human experience, because war experiences were supposed to be part of human experience in general. Even within psychoanalysis, traumatic neurosis was viewed with what I call a ‘clinical practice of suspicion’” (Rechtman, 914). . . . [Introduction of PTSD in 1980 in DSM-III was a consequence] less of a clinical discovery than of a kind of revolution in the American mentality. In fact, the battle for women’s rights in the 1960s, and the return of thousands of Vietnam veterans, created a very specific socio-political context where the evidence of trauma became a way to access a new political condition” (914).