Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Why PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) is now being called PTS


Time

For years, the U.S. military has referred to the constellation of anxiety, depression and anger many combat troops suffer when they return home as PTSD -- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. But in recent months, senior Pentagon officials seem to have gone on a search-and-destroy mission to kill the D -- Disorder -- and now prefer to call the syndrome simply Post-Traumatic Stress.

For good or for ill, the amputation of disorder represents a change in military nomenclature worth noting.

"This is a normal reaction to a very serious set of events in their life," Lieut. General Eric Schoomaker, the Army surgeon general, said of PTSD back in 2008. Well, if it's normal, why is it called a disorder, Battleland asked him at the time. Schoomaker, a thoughtful guy, pondered the obvious question for a moment. "Maybe we're not as sensitive as we might be to communicating things like disorder and the like," he finally said. "You raise a very interesting point. I'll have to talk that over with my psychiatric colleagues to see if there's a way of using different terminology that doesn't have people stigmatized by it." [...]



1 comment:

  1. tO BE CYNICAL.
    THEY WILL NOT HAVE TO PAY DISABILITY IF IT IS NOT A DISORDER.

    ReplyDelete

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