Comment by USNetizen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by USNetizen | Hacker News Reader

The US Army has done a lot of studies in this area of late, and found that a certain percentage of the population is somewhat resistant to PTSD after a traumatic event, but there are upwards of 20% or so that are pre-disposed to it as well (http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/newsletters/research-qua...). It's sad that it has taken centuries of warfare for people to wake up to the realization of this and finally just start learning how to identify and treat it.

A good friend of mine, an Iraq war combat veteran, runs a blog and non-profit on this subject as well at http://www.combatveteranswithptsd.com

If only we could do away with the stigma associated with it now which is falsely based much upon wild dramatizations in movies and elsewhere of eccentric, crazy or violent veterans (http://flcourier.com/2013/07/03/post-traumatic-stress-disord...).

It is clear than only a fraction of people who are exposed to trauma develop the full syndrome of PTSD. Thus despite the high prevalence of trauma exposure around the world, the lifetime prevalence of PTSD is no more than 7%. At any given point in time, 1 to 3% of the civilian population and higher proportions of Veteran populations will have currently active cases.

re: Title-query of the submitted HN article.

OR, only that small fraction is adequately diagnosed. This is a relatively new field, after all, and people fear what they don't understand. Given the stigma associated with it today many people would rather deny it or self-medicate than seek treatment unfortunately.

Anecdotally, this explains a lot. My father was a combat veteran of three wars and had gone through many life-and-death experiences and didn't suffer any of the obvious PTSD symptoms. It was obviously unpleasant for him to think about certain things but he was never afraid to share things he had experienced either.

As a political side note: I think the amount of personal responsibility of getting PTSD for a voluntarily subscribed soldier is way higher than for civilians finding themselves in a conflict.

I know this doesn't help - neither the soldiers nor the PTSDed civilians, yet, paradoxically, often the former are to some degree responsible for the PTSD of the latter.

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