Originally published August 30 2005
PTSD can affect anyone
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could theoretically happen to anyone -- even the hardiest and soundest of mind -- because it it caused by external events.
In the days after her crash with a car, she took to the couch, weeping --- but not over her fractured vertebra and dislocated shoulder.
Her body was quickly tended, but it took months before doctors even put a name to her other injury: post-traumatic stress disorder.
Once associated mainly with the horror of combat, PTSD has stretched to take in more frequent swerves along life's road --- car crashes, house fires, a sudden death or severe family illness, witnessing a disaster, or even learning of one.
PTSD has broadened the model of mental illness to cover disturbances set off solely by external events, outside of the mind.
Research suggests the disorder is now present in 5 percent of Americans, or more than 13 million, according to the PTSD Alliance, which unites professionals and advocates.
As PTSD's debilitating anxiety took hold, Puglisi started to feel nervous, flushed, even lightheaded when she was driven to a doctor or physical therapist.
While television droned war news from Iraq, she felt trapped in her own combat zone: "When you're in the war, you have no idea if you're going to be alive or dead in 10 minutes.
Medical authorities first accepted PTSD as a distinct psychiatric condition in 1980 at the urging of Vietnam veterans and their medical caretakers.
In 1994, the sudden death of a relative, or even learning that one was hurt, joined the expanding list of PTSD traumas in the chief diagnostic manual for psychiatry.
By the late 1990s, when Dr. Greenbrier Almond was working as a psychiatrist at a West Virginia veterans hospital, PTSD was already its leading diagnosis, above heart disease and diabetes, he says.
Some bad diagnosticians and purveyors of pop culture have come to consider just about any of life's shocks --- divorcing, losing a job, even failing a test --- as triggers for PTSD.
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