If nothing else, this article makes you think about the way Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other psychological diseases develop in patients. It seems straightforward to believe that the traumatic event occurs and then PTSD develops – this kind of direct cause-effect chain is how most war injuries occur. But it now appears that there may be intermediate steps with PTSD that are dependent on social cues:
In the United States, a soldier has a 30 percent chance of getting PTSD. In Britain, the rate is only 4 percent. Why the difference?
Such differences were found even when comparing soldiers who served in the most intense combat zones. In addition, while researchers found increased mental-health risk for American personnel sent on multiple deployments, no such connection was found in British soldiers.
One theory to explain these differences is that the minds of soldiers are responsive to cultural expectations of how they should feel – and that those expectations can be different from one place (or time) to another.
Even more telling:
This suggests that the psychological reaction to war does not happen in a flash like a shrapnel wound. Rather, it evolves as the soldiers integrate their experiences with the values and expectations of their culture. British soldiers in the Boer Wars were likely to complain of joint pain and muscle weakness, a condition their doctors called “debility syndrome”. In the US Civil War, soldiers often reacted to the trauma of battle by experiencing an aching in the left side of the chest and having the feeling of a weak heartbeat, labelled “Da Costa’s syndrome”. In the First World War, soldiers experienced “shell shock”, with symptoms that included nervous tics, grotesque body movements, and physical paralysis. It was not until after the Vietnam war that soldiers began to describe their symptoms primarily in terms of the intrusive thoughts, memory avoidance and uncontrollable anxiety and arousal that makes up the core of the PTSD diagnosis.
It makes you wonder how many other psychological conditions (e.g. depression) are similarly affected.
More info:
See also:
- How Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Works
- How Depression Works
Filed under: BrainStuff Tagged: depression, Mental health, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychology, PTSD
