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Is it time to drop the diagnosis of PTSD?

PTSD

Is it time to drop the diagnosis of PTSD?

CAUTION!  The material in this post was rejected by the “Proceedings of the Listening to Trauma Conference: Insights & Actions.” The reason: “Its tone is too contentious for a collection with positive studies of the physiological underpinnings for trauma and meaningful emerging clinical treatments.”  Proceed at your own risk.

In many respects post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been an extraordinarily fruitful diagnosis.  It connected the politics of the Vietnam War with the suffering of hundreds of thousands of veterans (Alford, pp 9-13).  As the authors of The Empire of Trauma, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, put it, trauma today is not a clinical but a moral judgment. Its advantage is that it has given us “this unprecedented ability to talk about—and hence experience—the violence of the world.” (p 276)  In addition, trauma has given us a new perspective on contemporary history, up close and from the ground up.  History written from the perspective of trauma is history written from the perspective of the victims.

Reliability versus validity

And yet I think PTSD has come to an intellectual dead-end for all the reasons discussed in this blog over the last two years.  

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