In the 20 years I’ve lived with PTSD, I’ve seen a dramatic shift in awareness of the disorder. Even though it existed back in 1997 after my traumatic incident, in my world nobody talked about it. In fact, I wasn’t formally diagnosed until 2011.
It’s wonderful that PTSD is becoming more known. It appears this trend has come out of necessity, since our country experienced a surge in the number of people who served multiple tours of duty in war-torn regions. So many in the military required resources for treating their PTSD, and in some cases, it even sparked interest in assisting older veterans from past wars when nothing had been available to them for treating PTSD.
This attention is welcomed by those of us who have had PTSD for decades and never served in the military. We make up the vast majority of people who have PTSD, and many of us needed to find our own path for living a peaceful life with the disorder. Thanks to the increased consideration towards our veterans, more people are aware of PTSD and treatment options than ever before. Every day there’s an article or news segment about PTSD. Movies, books, even songs touch upon life with PTSD.
It’s become familiar… almost too familiar, perhaps buzzword-like familiar.
While scrolling through social media after this past year’s presidential election, I saw posts about “post-election stress disorder." Despite our divided political climate, probably we all can agree that the 2016 presidential election was stressful. While the stakes were high for many people, I shook my head at the parallel drawn to PTSD and whether the aftermath of the election would result in people developing a disorder.
Months later millions of us watched the Super Bowl, and being that I live in northern New Jersey, known as the land of Giants and Jets fans….also known as fans who can’t stand Tom Brady, my circle of friends were unhappy with what transpired in the fourth quarter, enough so that on social media people posted about feeling PTSD symptoms that took them back to election night, noting the similarities in the surprising outcomes of both events. Again, I shook my head at the idea that they were experiencing the disorder.
Then PTSDJournal posted an article from LinkedIn written by Bethany McLean titled My Goldman Sachs Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (And Why I'm Grateful). They suggested McLean was so insensitive in using PTSD in her title that we should email her directly to educate her about the disorder. I read her article and noted that she lightly wrote about the stress she endured from her job in finance and how that’s helped her now as a journalist. Despite "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" being in the title of her article, as if leading readers like myself towards a hopeful story about overcoming trauma and turning the experience into something positive, she merely mentions once, “I think I have post-traumatic stress disorder”… the operative word being think. Reading that led me to believe she was never formally diagnosed. She also never touched upon a single aspect of living with PTSD.
I’ve been writing about PTSD for a while but my articles have received more attention in recent months, again thanks to social media. I’ve received more messages from people who tell me that they witnessed something traumatic, they felt stressed afterwards and they think they had PTSD. In some cases, I’ve asked if they still felt symptoms and most times they said no. Nearly all of them tell me they were never formally diagnosed.
There’s two common denominators here, the first being all of these things popped up on social media, giving the obvious reasoning that social media spreads misinformation but in reality social media is simply a reflection of our society’s perceptions. The second is the painful truth that PTSD is becoming an overused, uninformed buzzword. For those of us who suffer or have suffered with symptoms for years, this buzz stings like a bee… maybe even a swarm of bees depending on how affected someone is at the moment.
The 2016 presidential election was not like war. The Super Bowl was not like a sexual assault. The writer in me would rather use more creative language in describing these traumas in order to impact the reader into better understanding their depth, but the PTSD sufferer in me knows that doing so could easily trigger readers who have PTSD. You’ll have to trust me when I tell you that these things are worlds apart.
Here’s the truth—not everyone has PTSD. According to government statistics 70 percent of adults have experienced a traumatic event, and within that group only 20 perce go on to develop PTSD. Another statistic; 7.8 percent of all Americans will experience PTSD at some point in their lives, which means that 92.2 percent won’t. As PTSD grows its buzzwordiness, can we appreciate that the vast majority of people in our country will never have PTSD, even after a traumatic event? Isn’t that really good news?
Wait, the news gets even better! If you feel stress after a traumatic event that’s great news—it’s called being human living a human experience. It’s natural to feel stress after trauma. That’s absolutely normal. What isn’t normal is for one to repeatedly wake up from nightmares about the trauma. It’s not normal to feel intense anger at the littlest of things. It’s not normal to experience flashbacks to the trauma, either because something triggered that response or they happened randomly. It’s not normal for any of these symptoms to stay with people for years. That’s called PTSD.
To help you understand this even more, let me provide you the definition of PTSD. I’ll admit that I’m not a mental health professional, but I do own a copy of Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary. According to my copy, symptoms of PTSD include flashbacks to the traumatic event, avoiding stimuli related to the incident, memory disturbances, social or psychological withdrawal, irritability, increased aggressiveness, insomnia, startle response and vigilance. What PTSD is not is stress after a traumatic event.
So unless you’ve been diagnosed by a mental health professional, please stop saying you have PTSD. If you think you may have it but you haven’t been diagnosed, then see a therapist….and definitely don’t post on social media about whatever stressor of the moment is giving you PTSD.