Kolb LC The Post-traumatic stress disorders of combat; a
subgroup with a conditioned emotional response. MILIT. MED.
What recently named disorder is commonly referred to by the four first letters of its four-word name? IÆll give you a some clues:
It affects 100 times more Americans, and has killed ten times more Americans than AIDS.
IÆm going to tell you about a disorder which over 2-1/2 million Americans are at risk of acquiring in your lifetime; especially at risk are approximately one million individuals who, in surviving their physical involvement in a life-threatening situation which cost over 55,000 American lives, are as much as risk of killing themselves as they were of being killed at the time of their original exposure.
IÆm going to tell you about a terrible sort of social disease, a disease I know both as a victim and healer, an affliction with more than a 10% fatality rate. Once known as ôPost-Vietnam Syndromeö, it is properly termed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ... or P.T.S.D.
My goal is to describe to you a set of behavioral characteristics which you might tuck away in some recess not too far back in your mind, right next to the place you remember how you might run across and recognize such an individual, and where you store the memory of how I convinced you of the destructiveness of this disorder as well as its remarkable responsiveness to the right treatment.
There are, almost as though ôclonedö, between 300,000 and 500,000 young Americans who, over the past ten years, have displayed some or all of the following oddly linked behavioral characteristics:
* Depression, suicide, drug dependence
* Isolation, friendlessness, asexuality, nomadism
* Rage, battering, authority intolerance, negativism
* Emotional, psychic numbing
* Survival guilt, self-destructive or action junkie behavior
...