In his book “Tribes,” Sebastian Junger, author and combat journalist, presents a very interesting opinion on what he believes is an underlying cause of getting combat PTSD. Could there really be something in our genes that has been embedded in us since the stone age?
“From an evolutionary perspective, it (PTSD symptoms) is exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed. Anger keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself in more danger. Flashbacks also serve to remind you of the danger that’s out there – ‘a highly efficient single-event survival-learning mechanism,’ as one researcher termed it. All humans react to trauma in this way, and most mammals do as well. It may be unpleasant, but it’s preferable to getting killed.”
“Because PTSD is a natural response to danger, it’s almost unavoidable in the short term, and mostly self-correcting in the long term. Only about 20 percent of people exposed to trauma react with long-term (chronic) PTSD.”
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The authors post-traumatic stress symptoms were mainly in the form of flashbacks of being in a Taliban rocket attack in Afghanistan. He believed he had what is referred to as Classic Short-Term PTSD (acute) as the flashbacks eventually stopped.
You can read his June, 2015 article in Vanity Fair “How PTSD Became a Problem Beyond the Battlefield,” most of which is included throughout his book, at http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/05/ptsd-war-home-sebastian-junger
“From an evolutionary perspective, it (PTSD symptoms) is exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed. Anger keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself in more danger. Flashbacks also serve to remind you of the danger that’s out there – ‘a highly efficient single-event survival-learning mechanism,’ as one researcher termed it. All humans react to trauma in this way, and most mammals do as well. It may be unpleasant, but it’s preferable to getting killed.”
“Because PTSD is a natural response to danger, it’s almost unavoidable in the short term, and mostly self-correcting in the long term. Only about 20 percent of people exposed to trauma react with long-term (chronic) PTSD.”
######
The authors post-traumatic stress symptoms were mainly in the form of flashbacks of being in a Taliban rocket attack in Afghanistan. He believed he had what is referred to as Classic Short-Term PTSD (acute) as the flashbacks eventually stopped.
You can read his June, 2015 article in Vanity Fair “How PTSD Became a Problem Beyond the Battlefield,” most of which is included throughout his book, at http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/05/ptsd-war-home-sebastian-junger