E03: Critical Reading—lmj20

“Is PTSD Contagious?”

“But whatever people have called it, they haven’t been likely to grasp or respect it.”

• PTSD has had several different names given to it throughout history.
• Many do not understand the true meaning of PTSD.
• Many do not respect or take PTSD seriously.

“In 1943, when Lt. General George S. Patton met an American soldier at an Italian hospital recovering from “nerves,” Patton slapped him and called him a coward.”

• “Nerves” is one of the different names that PTSD was given based on the time period. This supports her claim in the earlier sentence.
• Even military generals many times can not understand PTSD and may attribute it to cowardice. This supports her claim made in the earlier sentence, that no matter what name PSTD was given, many are not likely to respect it.

“In 2006, the British Ministry of Defense pardoned some 300 soldiers who had been executed for cowardice and desertion during World War I, having concluded that many were probably just crippled by PTSD.”

• PTSD has been misunderstood for a long time, including the WWI era, and governments are beginning to discover PTSD for the crippling disorder that it is.
• How did the government choose which soldiers to pardon? Did they use today’s symptoms of PTSD to diagnose past soldiers?
• PTSD has often been referred to as cowardice and desertion. This supports her earlier claim about different names being used to describe PTSD.
• People were executed for displaying symptoms of PTSD, which was then regarded to as cowardice/desertion. This supports her earlier claim that people sometimes do not understand PTSD fully and therefore have trouble respecting it.

“Granted, diagnosing PTSD is a tricky thing. The result of a malfunctioning nervous system that fails to normalize after trauma and instead perpetrates memories and misfires life-or-death stress for no practical reason, it comes in a couple of varieties, various complexities…”

• PTSD is not easy to diagnose. This claim provides justification to those mentioned earlier, such as General Patton, who could not grasp and respect PTSD. Its difficult diagnosis could be a factor in the misunderstanding of it.
• PTSD is caused by a malfunctioning nervous system.
• PTSD is different for everyone since it comes “in a couple of varieties, various complexities.” This supports the claim that PTSD is hard to diagnose, since it is not just the same list of symptoms for every sufferer.
• PTSD stress begins for no practical reason.

“…has causes ranging from one lightning-fast event to drawn-out terrors or patterns of abuse—in soldiers, the incidence of PTSD goes up with the number of tours and amount of combat experienced.”

• PTSD does not always occur because of just one traumatic event. It can be the result of a period of traumatic events.
• She claims that the incidence of PTSD goes up with the amount of combat experience. This almost contradicts her previous claim that PTSD is complex and has a lot of variety. If it was complex, as she stated, it couldn’t be true that PTSD affects soliders in such a linear predictable pattern. The way she stated it indicates fact because she did not include the words “in most cases,” or “most commonly.”

“As with most psychiatric diagnoses, there are no measurable objective biological characteristics to identify it. Doctors have to go on hunches and symptomology rather than definitive evidence.”

• There are no biological characteristics that can be undoubtedly used to identify PTSD. This again supports her previous claim that PTSD is hard to diagnose.
• Even doctors have trouble accurately identifying PTSD. This supports her earliest claim that PTSD is misunderstood and hard to grasp.
• They often rely on symptoms rather than definitive evidence. This claim indicates that diagnoses are not based on fact, meaning that some soldiers diagnosed with PTSD may not actually have it and others who do have it may not be diagnosed. One of her previous claims says that PTSD is very complex and not the same for everyone. So, if the doctors are simply using “symptomology” to diagnose PTSD, there must be fault in that.