Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Seminar 4

Here we will explore the mental effects of trauma, initially through the emergence of 'shellshock' as a disease of total warfare in World War One, and then through the expansion of our understandings of 'trauma' across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Why and how did PTSD evolve from a diagnosis that named and de-stigmatised the emasculating effects of war trauma on soldiers' mental health to one that today maps and validates intense emotional and behavioural responses to to a wide range of disruptive and painful life events across many analytical categories of identity?

Weekly Questions

• Do the physical and/or psychical wounds of war mark or mar male perfection in wartime?
• Is human perfection necessarily functional perfection?
• Is 'perfection' universal, or culturally specific -- and why?
• Can we separate ‘perfection’ from gender (and other) norms?
• How do highly gendered medical diagnosis and responses to trauma reflect social and cultural beliefs?
• How did diagnostic categories intended for specific societally privileged groups become available to much wider and more diverse populations?

Readings: See Talis