btw2.net

notes from the field

Suffering Differently
By Ethan Watters, The New York Times Magazine, August 12, 2007

After the 2004 tsunami in Asia, many mental-health experts agreed that a “second tsunami” of mental illness in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder would strike the region. Like doctors rushing to the outbreak of an epidemic, American counselors and trauma researchers soon arrived on the scene hoping to pass on useful knowledge about PTSD. A few years on, however, their efforts have raised a troublesome question: Were they bringing the wrong treatment to the wrong people?

At issue is not whether tragic events like the tsunami trigger debilitating psychological distress and even mental illness — everyone agrees that they can. The question is over the extent to which survivors’ cultural beliefs shape their symptoms. If culture has the impact that some researchers suggest, the PTSD diagnosis may be of little help (and even do potential harm) when applied wholesale in other countries.

In the last 25 years, PTSD has had a remarkable ascendancy in American psychiatry and in public consciousness. Proponents of the diagnosis assert that experiences of fear or horror often spark a cluster of 17 broad symptoms, including intrusive thoughts, memory avoidance and uncontrollable anxiety. The concept of PTSD also encompasses notions of how best to overcome the disorder, usually through measured re-exposure to the original trauma supervised by a counselor. PTSD, many Americans assume, describes the way that all humans react to trauma.

Gaithri Fernando, an expert on trauma from California State University, questions that assumption. “Researchers and counselors who came to Sri Lanka after the tsunami did find some PTSD symptoms,” Fernando says. “But it was not the nightmares or flashbacks that most of the population was concerned with. The deepest psychological wounds for Sri Lankans were not on the PTSD checklists; they were the loss of or the disturbance of one’s role in the group.”…

Eye on DNA Headlines for 12 August 2007
by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei, Posted August 12, 2007
includes:

Matt Ridley writes in The Agile Gene:

If personality is created by parents, peers, or society at large, then it is still determined; it is not free.

In some ways the news that our genes are important contributors to our personality should be reassuring: the imperviousness of individual human nature to outside influences provides a bulwark against brainwashing. At least we are determined by our own intrinsic forces rather than somebody else’s.

A more non-trauma, non-DNA US culture view at: Culture, Counterculture #1