As far back as we know, there have been individuals inca-pacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder". Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomemon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions, a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilising these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in a psychiatric unit specialising in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the tran-scripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.@@@Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory.

Recent years have seen the rise of historical trauma as a construct to describe the impact of colonization, cultural suppression, and historical oppression of Indigenous peoples in North America (e.g., Native Americans in the United States, Aboriginal peoples in Canada). The discourses of psychiatry and psychology contribute to the conflation of disparate forms of violence by emphasizing presumptively universal aspects of trauma response. Many proponents of this construct have made explicit analogies to the Holocaust as a way to understand the transgenerational effects of genocide. However, the social, cultural, and psychological contexts of the Holocaust and of post-colonial Indigenous “survivance” differ in many striking ways. Indeed, the comparison suggests that the persistent suffering of Indigenous peoples in the Americas reflects not so much past trauma as ongoing structural violence. The comparative study of genocide and other forms of massive, organized violence can do much to illuminate both common mechanisms and distinctive features, and trace the looping effects from political processes to individual experience and back again. The ethics and pragmatics of individual and collective healing, restitution, resilience, and recovery can be understood in terms of the self-vindicating loops between politics, structural violence, public discourse, and embodied experience.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1363461514536358

Rethinking Historical Trauma

Debating war-trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in an interdisciplinary arena

http://wteague.com/Trauma/Shame/CPTS/The%20role%20of%20shame%20in%20posttraumatic%20stress%20disorder%20with%20citation.pdf

The role of shame in posttraumatic stress disorder: a proposal for a socio-emotional model for DSM-V.

In this article, we question narrative inquiry's predominant ethics of benefit when engaging in narrative research on trauma and social suffering. Through a particular focus on the use of a narrative methodology in a refugee health study, we explore the potential risk and protective function of narrative trauma research with vulnerable respondents. A review of ethical questions emerging during the course of a multiple-case study with refugee families documents how narrative methods' characteristics clearly revisit the impact of traumatization on autonomy, narrativity, and relationship building in participants and, thus, evoke the replay of traumatic experience within the research relationship itself. Blurring a straightforward ethics of benefit, this reactivation of trauma accounts for the research relationship's balancing movement between reiterating and transforming traumatic distress, and urges for the need to contain coexisting aspects of both harm and benefit in developing narrative research with traumatized participants.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1049732310376521

Holding Harm: Narrative Methods in Mental Health Research on Refugee Trauma

INTRODUCTION We live in a world torn and scarred by violence. Globalization has increased the speed and scale of conflicts and catastrophes, but violence has been integral to the human condition from our earliest origins. We should expect, therefore, to find its traces in the design of our brains and bodies no less than in the weave of our communities. Trauma has become a keyword through which clinicians and scholars from many disciplines approach the experience of violence and its aftermath. The metaphor of trauma draws attention to the ways that extremes of violence break bodies and minds, leaving indelible marks even after healing and recovery. But the notion of trauma has been extended to cover a vast array of situations of extremity and equally varied individual and collective responses. Trauma can be seen at once as a sociopolitical event, a psychophysiological process, a physical and emotional experience, and a narrative theme in explanations of individual and social suffering. Within psychiatry, much recent work on the psychological impact of trauma has focused on the diagnostic construct of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The diagnostic criteria for PTSD include a history of exposure to a traumatic event and symptoms from each of three groups: intrusive recollections of the trauma event, avoidance of reminders of the event and emotional numbing, and hyperarousal (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000).

/pdf/understanding-trauma-introduction-inscribing-trauma-in-1qsn6k8xbw.pdf

Understanding Trauma: Introduction: Inscribing Trauma in Culture, Brain, and Body

Understanding Trauma: Epilogue: Trauma and the Vicissitudes of Interdisciplinary Integration

Understanding Trauma: Trauma in Context: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives

Cultural perspectives on trauma

Understanding Trauma: NEUROBIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON TRAUMA

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Robert Lemelson

Author Tools

Chat about Author