What´s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

What is PTSD?
Post-Traumatic Stress Di-sorder is a syndrome exp-erienced by many veter-ans, and is a priority of a plethora of psychological researchers. The Diag-nostic and Statistical Man-ual of Mental disorders lis-ts eight criterion for this widespread mental dis-ease, including a stressor, meddling symptoms, ev-asion, amendments in provocation and react-ivity, and a duration of symptoms for more than a month. PTSD is often characterized by disrupt-ions in sleep patterns, with the traumatic event fre-quently popping up in the veterans’ nightmares.
PTSD has proven to be unpredictable, and there remain many ambiguous aspects to the disorder. It is thought that perhaps PTSD doesn’t even require experiencing a traumatic event.
However, many psych-ologists estimate that the number of PTSD diag-noses has become too large, and that the diag-nosis of PTSD has become too generalized.
Over-diagnosis of PTSD
According to a veteran, anxiety and depression are often misdiagnosed as PTSD. Since the Vietnam War, the occurrence and diagnosis of PTSD has skyrocketed. After a sev-ere reduction in the rate of PTSD in veterans where poorly documented PTSD cases were culled from the collection, Bruce P. Dohr-enwend of Columbia found a 13% reduction in the lifetime rate of PTSD; in a continuation of Dohr-enwend’s work, McNally concluded that a majority of PTSD patients were fit to live in everyday life, re-ducing the lifetime rate of PTSD by another 7% (Dobbs 2). In addition, many veterans have been known to be over- or under-reporting their PTSD symptoms, making the accurate diagnosis even more trouble-some.
Because the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress disorder is difficult, many researchers are working on new methods of diag-nosing PTSD more ac...

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...Danish soldiers in the study showed no signs of PTSD, another large group of tested soldiers only showed short-term symptoms of PTSD. A plethora of soldiers exper-iencing severe PTSD symptoms only exper-ienced these symptoms after returning home, not after a specific traumatic event occurred on the field.
In this respect, PTSD proves ambiguous. Though the DSM includes a criterion requiring the experience of a traumatic event, PTSD can be found in many forms, and is yet to be fully understood.
Connection to Childhood
Rosen’s study, focused on the root cause of PTSD, showed that stress (major anxiety or nightmares) shown by soldiers before sent into deployment lessened or deliquesced in 13% of soldiers (Herbert 2). Additionally, those that did develop severe PTSD had suffered emotional problems prior to deploy-ment—especially child-hood abuse or exposure to violence.