Post-traumatic stress disorder is another example of the medicalisation of life

On p 95 Summerfield argues that post-traumatic stress disorder is a telling example of the role of society and politics in the process of inventing a condition rather than of psychiatry in discovering it. He describes how the diagnosis arose out of the Vietnam war and argues that the term has now made victims out of people in distress and become attached to relatively commonplace events such as accidents, muggings, a difficult labour, or bad news. This, he says, is replacing resilience and coping: "There is more social utility attached to expressions of victimhood than to `survivorhood.' " He also disputes that the condition is a distinct psychiatric diagnosis, arguing that it is non-specific and imprecise. It labels people as being mentally ill when they are not.

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The invention of post-traumatic stress disorder and the social usefulness of a psychiatric category

Derek Summerfield
BMJ 2001 322: 95-98. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]