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By Alice Karekezi, Salon
In the past 30 years, post-traumatic stress disorder has gone from exotic rarity to omnipresent. Once chiefly applied to wartime veterans returning from combat, it is now a much more common diagnosis, still linked to traumatic events but now including those occurring outside the battle zone: the death of a loved one on a hospital bed, a car crash on the highway, an assault in the neighborhood park. Many would argue that this is a good thing: greater recognition of psychologically distressing events will lead to more people seeking treatment and a decrease in the preponderance of PTSD – a win-win.
Stephen Joseph disagrees. In his new book, “What Doesn’t Kill Us,” the professor of psychology, health and social care at the University of Nottingham (in the U.K.) warns that our culture’s acceptance of PTSD has become excessive and has led to an over-medicalization of experiences that should be considered part of ordinary, normal, human experience. This has kept us from proactively working through our grief and anxiety: We’ve become too quick to go to the shrink expecting him to fix us, rather than allowing ourselves the opportunity to grow and find new meaning in our lives as a result of painful, but common, events. Joseph advocates for a push toward post-traumatic growth as therapy to treat the stress of trauma, which he distinguishes as being different from the hokey, blue skies and rainbows, pop psychology that he claims has exploded in our culture in the past decade.
Joseph spoke to Salon over the phone to discuss our misunderstanding of the disorders, the meaning and usefulness of suffering, and if some cultures are more prone to PTSD than others.
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