E03: Critical Reading—Prof2020

Is PTSD Contagious?: A Brief Analysis

“Like traumatic brain injury.”

-My only assumption is that this article was not properly proofread before publishing.

“Researchers posit that TBI can make the brain more vulnerable to PTSD, or that it can exacerbate its symptoms of exhaustion, agitation, confusion, headaches.”

-This sentence assumes that there are people researching this problem and different things correlated to it but what researchers? Who are they? Are we supposed to figure that out ourselves or just take the badly written article’s word for it? What credibility does this provide its claims? Even if the this statement were entirely crap I’d be far more inclined to believe them if the supposed researchers had been named.

-It also makes the assertion that you can’t have PTSD without suffering these symptoms. I’m aware they’re often the most common but I was also under the impression the symptoms and their severity vary greatly depending on the person.

“They’re not positive about that, or about whether TBI makes PTSD harder to treat.”

-Wow this is a massive contradiction. In the previous sentence, the author claims that “Researchers posit…” The definition of posit is to assume as a fact or put forward as a basis of argument. Now the author is telling us that they’re not as sure about themselves as they were a few words ago. What changed?

“James Peterson’s post-injection chill-out wore off after a month, faster than it does for other patients—maybe because of his TBI.”

-This sentence bothers me just because of the astounding lack of information. How long are the injections effects supposed to last? Is James one of few or many who metabolize the injection this quickly? It makes the assumption that the reader is already of aware of this information.

“Either way, as for TBI, well, “there is no cure,” says David Hovda, director of UCLA’s Brain Injury Research Center and an adviser to the Department of Defense.”

-I’m not a director of anything, much less UCLA’s Brain Injury Research Center but this is a highly generalized statement and very misleading. Traumatic Brain Injury is not a disease so there’s no antidote. Also, TBI is an umbrella of sorts which includes all severe brain injuries. To say that there is no cure to any of them seems to marginalize those situations that don’t fit this criteria. In many cases, with time and rehabilitation, it is more than possible to return to normalcy.