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Post-traumatic stress disorder is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. Traumatic events that may trigger PTSD include violent personal assaults, natural or human-caused disasters, accidents, or military combat.
Written accounts of similar symptoms to PTSD date back to ancient times. Clear documentation started to show up in historical medical literature of the Civil War, when a PTSD-like disorder was known as Da Costa's Syndrome. There were also particularly good descriptions of post traumatic stress symptoms in the medical literature on combat veterans of World War II and Holocaust survivors. Starting with the Civil War and Da Costa's Syndrome, PTSD has taken on a couple of different names such as shell shock in World War I, and combat neurosis in World War II and the Koran War. It wasn't until after Vietnam that research and documentation began in earnest.
The American Psychiatric Association added PTSD to the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classification in 1980. The significant change ushered in by the PTSD concept was the stipulation that the etiological agent was outside the individual rather than an inherent individual weakness. The key to understanding the scientific basis and clinical expression of PTSD is the concept of trauma. The framers of the original PTSD diagnosis had in mind events such as war, rape, torture, and natural disasters which are different then the very painful stressors of normal life such as failure, divorce, rejection, serious illness, and financial reverses. It is on this idea that they assumed most individuals have the ability to cope with ordinary stress but that their adaptive capabilities are likely to be overwhelmed when confronted by a traumatic stressor.
We now recognize that there are individual differences regarding the capacity to cope with stress. While some people...