Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Issues of utility, traumatogenicity, co-morbidity, teratogenicity vs. psychogenicity, ethnicity, “gendericity” and chronicity. An introduction
✍ Scribed by Walter E. Penk; Ralph Robinowitz
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1989
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 202 KB
- Volume
- 45
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0021-9762
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Clinical Psychology for commissioning a second monograph on Vietnam combat-related Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Being psychologists, we are genetically predisposed to generating interpretations. So, of course, we are compelled to attach meanings to the request by the Journal of Clinical Psychology to ask so quickly for a second monograph on the same topic. At first, we offer a simple interpretation. Interest about PTSD is flourishing. Much is being published. Articles are appearing at such a rapid rate that another monograph is needed quickly to register new ideas and new findings.
Publishing so many articles in so short a span of time shows that Clinical Psychology is not only about people, but is like people. And, just as each person in the United States may have at least 15 minutes of fame, as Andy Warhol used to say, so we can expect that each topic in Clinical Psychology will be given at least a brief moment in the bright glare of attention. As with many people, so it is with many subjects in Psychology: Momentarily there is the spotlight of attention, followed by the dark shadows of anonymity.
However, PTSD is a little different. It appears, disappears, and then re-appears, its resurgence influenced by crises and their aftermath. So, here we are again, at a point in time when there is renewed interest in PTSD (and/or one of its equivalents). And now another set of psychologists are preserving in the archival literature their clinical insights about the lingering effects of war in the lives of combatants.
What can anyone actually say that adds to what has already been said so well? For the topic of PTSD, albeit in alternate forms, already has been described so eloquently by so many psychologists and other mental health specialists in so many essays, articles, chapters, and books. Why add something new when many simply have not read the rich clinical hertiage in Psychology, one example of which is John Dollard's and