{"id":31535,"date":"2016-12-16T01:00:58","date_gmt":"2016-12-16T06:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31535"},"modified":"2019-05-20T09:30:01","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T13:30:01","slug":"qotd-pre-traumatic-stress-disorder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/12\/16\/qotd-pre-traumatic-stress-disorder\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder"},"content":{"rendered":"

… it might have been worth mentioning that, whatever the validity of PTSD as a diagnosis, most people who experience a traumatic event in life do not suffer from it. As is to be expected of a creature as protean as Man, people respond differently to their experiences. They do not forget the trauma, but its memory does not affect their subsequent lives in any pathological way. I once met an American psychiatrist, John E. Nardini, who had been a prisoner of the Japanese for more than three years, who had seen half his fellow prisoners die of hunger and disease, and who had himself suffered from beriberi, but who felt that the appalling experience, which of course he would have wished on no one, had actually strengthened him. The development of PTSD does not follow from trauma as the night does the day, but depends on many things \u2014 no doubt the culture of the traumatized among them.<\/p>\n

In any case, PTSD is largely irrelevant to what Heer is writing about. He isn\u2019t writing about post-traumatic stress disorder at all, but rather, a new diagnosis of pre<\/em>-traumatic stress disorder. I can\u2019t help but recall the case of Mr. Podsnap, in Charles Dickens\u2019s Our Mutual Friend<\/em>:<\/p>\n