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Leora's avatar

PTSD is one of the more treatable mental health disorders through evidence-based CBT methods. But like anything else, you have to want to recover. You learn to take responsibility for your own condition, manage your triggers rather than avoiding them, and not project your PTSD into obligations on other people. Things like trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic.

I was raised in a community with a lot of Holocaust survivors. They definitely had baggage, but they somehow functioned better than a lot of supposedly traumatized 20-somethings today. And they never, ever felt sorry for themselves. Human beings have been through an awful lot - outside of the contemporary West, it's quite normal to go through war, famine, disasters, and a lot of premature death. Sometimes this perspective is valuable.

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Martin Greenwald, M.D.'s avatar

Very well said. These trends are both baffling and alarming.

The great majority of people who go through potentially traumatic events do not, of course, go on to develop PTSD.

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