The PTSD Story: Part 1

I am currently working on a chapter on PTSD in my book tentatively titled, Fear and Fight: Understanding Our Natural and Learned Responses to a Threat.

This chapter came about in the saw way this book came about. I was writing the conclusion and wanted a paragraph or two to explain how the new and better understanding about our natural and learned responses to a threat can help better understand PTSD and the treatment thereof. Research to provide that paragraph or two produced a great deal of information, so much so that a paragraph or two became a chapter in and of itself in my book.

The PTSD story is a fascinating story. It is a story that goes far beyond PTSD. It sheds light on the mental health discipline today and how it developed. It sheds light on the 'unholy alliance' between the mental health discipline and the military that poses dire consequences for military members and society as a whole. It sheds light on the 'unholy alliance' between the mental health discipline and many organisations. It sheds light on what is 'order' and how it becomes or is a 'disorder.' It is a fascinating story.

I will write a series of posts that discuss the PTSD story over the coming period of time, however, to start, what is PTSD?

There are a host of definitions of PTSD, however, the most accurate is:

PTSD is an initialism for ‘posttraumatic stress disorder’ which is a term that first appeared as an anxiety disorder in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM).

Allow me to introduce you to the main characters in the PTSD story:

The APA is the main professional organisation of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the largest psychiatric organisation in the world. The association publishes various journals and pamphlets, including the DSM. The DSM codifies psychiatric conditions and is used worldwide as a guide for diagnosing mental disorders. It is often referred to as ‘The Bible’ of psychiatry. The first edition of the DSM was published in 1952, and several new editions and revisions have since been released. PTSD was included in the third edition of the DSM published in 1980. The most recent edition of the DSM is the fifth edition, published in 2013, in which PTSD is classified as a trauma- and stressor-related disorder, a classification that is a major revision of how PTSD is conceptualised as we will see below. 

In the next post, we will commence the PTSD story not with the DSM but the US Army's Medical 203 which provided credibility and acceptance of the fledgling psychiatric and psychological discipline and laid the foundation for mental health practice as we know it.