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Comment by lujim | Hacker News Reader

How does someone get PTSD these days? It was originally the territory of civilians and soldiers who spent an extended period of time in an active combat area. I'm not saying that other things can't lead to PTSD, but if it becomes too watered down then we would need a new term for the physical and mental symptoms that a soldier might experience after 6 months or a year in daily front line combat.

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It turns out there are degrees of PTSD, it's not binary.

http://advocatingopportunity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/...

Any near death experience (real or perceived) can do it

Makes sense. Maybe it's a question of severity. In WW1 British doctors thought it was a physical neurological condition caused by the concussion of artillery shells. They noticed that soldiers had trembling “rather like a jelly shaking”; headache; tinnitus, or ringing in the ear; dizziness; poor concentration; confusion; loss of memory; and disorders of sleep.

While there are many things that can cause a person to suffer from this (life and limb type scenarios) I'm questioning the validity of wide spread self diagnosed "PTSD".

Those are all symptoms of a concussion. In my understanding, anxiety attacks are one of the primary symptoms of PTSD.

I just cut and pasted those from a Smithsonian article. Docs saw those symptoms in soldiers that hadn't been near shelling which clued them in that it wasn't caused by the concussion from artillery. Anxiety attacks in 1915 were probably just labelled as cowardice.

Rape is a common one.

America is not India.

Btw, is there any serious explanation other than blatant racism why rape is so prevalent in India, e.g. compared to China where the male/female ratio is grossly on the male side...

India has more than 10 ethinic regions, languages, etc. Many places in India are tribal, without internet, without running water, without roads. There are also many cities that have infrastructure. India is probably as ethinically diverse (or even more diverse) as Europe. When access to education and infrastructure expands to the darkest corners of India, the situation will improve. Pre-existing citizens tend to be stuck in their old ways.

> Pre-existing citizens tend to be stuck in their old ways

Most people's old ways don't include raping people

I'm not sure why you're downvoted. Sexual assault frequently leads to PTSD:

>One study that examined PTSD symptoms among women who were raped found that almost all (94 out of 100) women experienced these symptoms during the two weeks immediately following the rape. Nine months later, about 30 out of 100 of the women were still reporting this pattern of symptoms [1]

And is depressingly prevalent:

>Nearly 1 in 5 (18.3%) women and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) reported experiencing rape at some time in their lives. [2]

[1] http://www.ptsd.va.gov/public/PTSD-overview/women/sexual-ass...

[2] http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/SV-DataSheet-a.pdf

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