> They can cause something like PTSD.
I believe that OP was asking about actual PTSD, which is thing with a specific definition and diagnostic criteria.
I believe that OP was asking about actual PTSD, which is thing with a specific definition and diagnostic criteria.
Yeah losing all your savings working on shit that didn't matter in the end while wasting years of your life isn't traumatizing at all. Glad you cleared that up for them.
At what point does it become traumatizing? After a person in that circumstance falls into one hellish layer of depression after another and decides to finally end it?
Nobody is saying that those experiences aren't traumatic or stressful. What we're saying is that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a specific thing with a specific definition, distinct from "the set of all people who have experienced trauma as the result of stress".
The person I was replying to was saying exactly that. The fact there's a specific diagnostic criteria wasn't relevant.
That said, you may find C-PTSD of interest:
https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/essentials/comple...
If you take even a cursory glance at C-PTSD, you'll see a lot of it has to do with the stress of being trapped in extreme circumstance, with highly deleterious or even catastrophic mental health effects resulting from that prolonged stress.
You wouldn't tell a POW or concentration camp survivor that their trauma was less than that of a combat veteran or shooting victim, would you? Of course not.
Consider failed startups can sometimes lead to homelessness, which is both very trapping and extremely stressful. Sometimes deadly.
Point being: if the trauma ultimately enlists the same physiological and emotional mechanisms in ripping apart the human mind, then attempting to become an arbiter of trauma severity is really besides the point, if not poor taste.
Personally, I've experienced events that satisfy Criterion A of the DSM-V PTSD diagnostic criteria. Think dealing with an enraged, manic family member with a loaded rifle. Being on the receiving end of domestic violence. Threats of sexual violence against loved ones. That level of bad.
While the effects of those events easily satisfied the remainder of diagnostic criteria at the time and lasted quite a while, they pale in comparison to the chronic effects of choosing to pursue a startup and what that did to my mental health.
I’m curious, since you’re a pedant about diagnostic criteria, I’m surprised that a qualified individual would make such a determination from a brief HN post.
The medical model of the human brain is good for billing insurance companies and standardizing clinician behavior i suppose but not necessarily an objective reality.
The terms refer to an abstracted and coarse version of reality. They don't have zero utility, even if the criticisms are fitting.
The purpose of labeling disorders, whether it's PTSD, autism, or depression, is to be able to learn from related experiences. It's useful to talk about founders having post-traumatic stress because you can apply lessons learned from larger groups like soldiers and ER surgeons, both of which have large organizations studying their mental health, unlike startup founders.
Labels also cause problems. People reject labels because they feel they are so unique that no other human experience could possibly shed light upon their own. They may be right about some intellectual aspect of themselves, but people's emotional systems are pretty darn similar.