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Life During Wartime: Can Mental Illness Be a Rational Response?

Explore how treating post-traumatic stress disorder in high-risk environments can aid recovery for terrorism survivors.

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iStockphoto

Charles Figley

was a US Marine who signed up for service in the Vietnam War to "accelerate my progression toward being considered a man.” But after his tour of duty he ended up as veteran protesting against the war, stunned

by the psychological impact on himself and his fellow soldiers. He began to investigate the symptoms of his fellow veterans and, along with other anti-war psychologists and psychiatrists, proposed

a disorder called "post-Vietnam syndrome" where veterans carried emotions of the war with them despite being safely back on US soil. In fact, various forms of combat stress had been recorded during previous wars, from "disordered action of the heart" diagnosed

in the Boer Wars to the dramatic symptoms

of shell shock and war neurosis from the First World War. The concept caught on

and appeared, in a demilitarised form, as "post-traumatic stress disorder," a mental illness where an earlier ...

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