Why is stress after trauma a 'disorder'? And how is it a solution to drug people up, making them forget this?
Forgetting, as a treatment, may be something some people want.
To my eyes your comment is pretty dismissive ("drug people up"). A little empathy, and an open heart goes a long way here.
15+ years later she remembers telling them to go ahead and do it, then there's a hole in her memory for about 10 minutes.
I'd say that's one good solution.
This is one reason we always give a shoutout to Tria Orthopedics in the Twin Cities, MN region when someone needs an orthopedist: she was one of their first patients and the wrist maintained full range of motion after healing.
There's tons and tons of examples why stress after trauma is a disorder. Also a very good wikipedia article if you'd like a place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-traumatic_stress_disorder
It isn't. Sometimes you can experience trauma, then experience stresses, and react to the stress in normal ways.
The disorder is when this doesn't happen, and you have atypical reactions to stress, which can be debilitating.
Just like some people are left with persistent recurrent pain in an otherwise healthy and recovered limb (often known as rheumatism), some people are left with persistent recurrent stress after trauma - such as suddenly bursting out crying or cowering in fear after incidentally remembering trauma that happened 20 years ago while doing the dishes.
When this sort of thing happens, we call it "post-traumatic stress disorder", and are looking for ways to treat patients. Making them forget the event is one possible treatment, and there are others (such as trying to disassociate the event itself and the strong negative feelings).
Just like acute pain is useful to keep us healthy, acute stress is very important. But chronic pain and post-traumatic stress are not useful to anyone, they are failure modes of these otherwise useful systems, and it makes sense to try various ways of correcting them.
It isn't. If anything that supports OPs point
We know this for sure since there is an extremely rare disease in which people literally feel no pain. These people have a very tough life, and have to constantly manually inspect their bodies to make sure they don't have injuries they're not aware of (cuts, sprained ankles etc.), and are also essentially unable to participate in any kind of sports because of this.
For example, when putting your hand on a surface, if you didn't feel the pain of extreme heat, you wouldn't know that your skin is getting burned. Or, if you miss-stepped and sprained your ankle but didn't feel the pain, you would keep putting your full weight on that sprained ankle and probably turn it into a serious injury. Without pain, you wouldn't know you're having a heart attack and wouldn't seek any medical attention. I can go on and on: accute pain is extremely important to basic health. You can't "be careful", unless you think it's reasonable to get full medical checkups after every walk.
Note that "acute" means "short lived", it doesn't mean it's particularly strong. It's the opposite of "chronic", which means "long term". For example, when you prick your finger, you're feeling some (very mild) accute pain, which serves the purpose of letting you know your skin was pierced and you need to stop pushing in that direction.
My whole point was that this is utterly wrong, and that, while stress during a traumatic experience is normal and potentially even required (akin to pain), stress after the experience is definitely not a good thing, and should be treated in any way possible (whether that's family support, therapy, or medication is up to every individual case) - just like chronic pain.
Relating to pain, people should get relief as soon as the pain has done its job - that is, as soon as they know about the injury and the area they have to protect - any more pain than that is unnecessary, even if normal. In the vast majority of circumstances, I imagine this is probably a matter of seconds or minutes after the injury occurred. I can imagine some weird, vanishingly rare, circumstances where the pain may legitimately need to be endured for longer, but that would be splitting hairs.
And an accute anxiety attack (assuming this occurs without some traumatic event) is obviously not normal or helpful and should be treated immediately. If this anxiety attack is happening during a traumatic event (say, I am currently being held at gunpoint), taking a pill to calm down may be less required (though even that is debatable, especially for a panic attack, which generally leaves you entirely helpless).
When has grief done its job? I've never been held at gunpoint yet somehow experienced stress on many occasions. How many of those do you want to subject me to? The DSM generally says 6 months to become a disorder for most things from what I've read. How about considering a question that isn't trivial to answer?
How is it a solution? If giving people a drug reduces disorders and that benefit outweighs the cost, then it’s generally considered a good idea.