PTSD

Anna Lacy
January 20, 2014
Trauma in Film and Literature

PTSD 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is often considered by the public to be a disorder that affects

soldiers who have returned from combat situations because of its similarities with 'shell shock'. In

reality anyone who has experienced anything from rape, kidnapping, war, or even a car crash can

suffer from PTSD. People who are affected by this disorder often experience 'repeated hallucinations,

 dreams, thoughts, or behaviors stemming from the traumatic event" (Caruth 4). The sufferers minds

are often so focused on blocking out the event that when they have dreams where they are reliving

the trauma they often do not understand what is going on. For example,

              ' a child Holocaust survivor who had been at Theresienstadt continually had flashbacks of    
               trains, and didn't know where they came from; she thought she was going crazy. Until one
               day, in a group survivor meeting, a man says, "Yes, at Theresienstadt you could see the
                trains through the bars of the children's barracks."' (Kindler, 1990).

What the child was experiencing is not a form of amnesia but instead the brain attempting to block

out the traumatic event that was experienced. Often a survivors memory of a traumatic event consists

of either memory of the entire event but lacking the emotions felt at the time, the person feels numb

emotionally about the event; or experiencing a large amount of emotions ranging from the emotions

experienced at the time to emotions experienced from the aftermath of the event but with little to no

memory to go with the emotions.