Post-traumatic stress isn’t a disorder, it’s life

by **Accer** Tue 03 Mar 2020, 10:47 am

Post-traumatic stress isn’t a disorder,
it’s life

By Heather Mallick . Star Columnist
Mon., March 2, 2020

Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD as it is known, is supposedly rampant. Although the label should be used only for extreme cases, PTSD is mentioned casually and frequently. It is indeed a story of the moment.

There is always a story of the moment. It rises and crests, and then attention turns elsewhere, having occupied busy minds without sparking new insights or creating permanent help.

Post-9/11, books with “American” in the title had a sales boost, so for a decade books listed alphabetically crowded into the A section. At various times, with occasional flashbacks, we have been bombarded with fringe medical cases, misery memoirs, tales of tidying and discarding, breast cancer, veganism (a form of tidying), Generation Z anger, and now aging and death (boomers are aging and dying).

But PTSD, on the other hand, keeps rolling along because it has a crisp abbreviation and seems to explain so much when it really only begins to explain. It’s so handy.

PTSD is a psychiatric diagnosis for some people who have seen or experienced terrible trauma, often in the course of their job. Allegedly 9.2 per cent of Canadians (but only 3.5 per cent of Americans, which seems implausible) will suffer it in their lifetime, with women being diagnosed twice as much as men.

As with COVID-19, amorphous conditions tend to breed unreliable numbers. The disorder is allegedly worsened by a lack of social support and life explosions, like job loss or divorce. But isn’t everything?

PTSD causes nightmares and flashbacks. According to Veterans Affairs Canada, sufferers think negatively, feeling irrational fear, anger, guilt and shame. They live on permanent edge, leaving them irritable, numb, emotionally distant and unable to sleep. They may often feel like something terrible is about to happen, even when they are safe.

Here is where I part company with the very idea of PTSD, as opposed to PTS. I do not think such reactions are a disorder. Instead, they are the reactions of any sane person to a horrible event outside their control. The last two sentences of the previous paragraph are a crisp description of how most Canadians feel about Donald Trump being the American president, or how I feel in a large grocery store. Call it PTSR, post-traumatic stress reaction.

There is such a thing as the over-medicalization of life, with people being misdiagnosed or overdiagnosed in tandem with the view that says traumatized people should toughen up, get a grip, and just do their job. But they can’t because they’re traumatized. The “disorder” is a sane and understandable response.

Look at the people said to suffer PTSD: dispatchers, nurses, police, firefighters, jail guards, rape victims, jurors, homeless LGBTQ people, prisoners, gig workers, stabbing victims, women in rural work camps who can’t escape their rapist, the overworked, those worried by climate change, older people isolated by storms, prosecutors in the Flint, Mich., water poison case, and migrant parents who had their children taken at the U.S. border.

I believe them. Those jobs can wreck people. I won’t mock them by saying they suffer from a disorder. No, they suffer from being rape victims, police, firefighters, nurses, migrants whose children were stolen, etc.

Psychiatry helps, but it can also distort. The word “stigma” is overused — in a particular situation, anything can be stigmatized — but why call coping with life a psychiatric condition? It’s a condition, surely, but a normal one.

PTSD can be used like an elastic band, stretched far beyond its meaning. When an Edmonton man, Silva Koshwal, claimed PTSD flashbacks in 2015 caused him to stab his ex-girlfriend to death, remove her heart, ovaries and uterus, and nail that heart to the wall, well, no.

Airplane passengers say PTSD requires the company of their emotional support animal, but can’t provide a psychiatrist’s letter, not even to over-medicalize their natural stressed state.

Here we sit, with the planet baking and COVID-19 hoping to travel to Canada and stay in the cheap Airbnbs that are our lungs. That is stressful, which is normal. What if you come down with the coronavirus? What name should we give that kind of stress? Perhaps PTS-19 would cover it.

Heather Mallick is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick

Post-traumatic stress isn’t a disorder, it’s life