Also, if you do get PTSD this way, is it realistic that you would, of your own free will, continue to act on those websites?
I don’t have any facts for the discussion really, but that headline is sort of stupid and misleading. It implies that war veterans and only war veterans can/should suffer from PTSD but that’s not true at all. While many (if not most) active duty veterans do suffer from it, there are plenty of people who are diagnosed with it due to traumatic non-war events (or series of events) they experience in their civilian-only lives.
Yeah, my alternatives for sources were basically FOX, Daily Mail, or a handful of youtube videos. Call it the lesser of evils. You can get PTSD from civilian problems. But… Cyberstalking? Trolls on twitter? Really?
If you are a delicate enough flower I guess you can get it from almost anything.
If you can’t simply turn your computer off or go to other web sites to avoid cyberstalking/bullying you already have issues besides PTSD which need addressing.
There is an aviation enthusiast named Steve Douglass that posted just yesterday about a long time troll who is obsessed with him. I don’t agree with the post, I think it’s a little over the top, but I can see how that situation could lead to something like PTSD in some people. Twitter, on the other hand, you can walk away from.
No, not really. You can certainly get anxiety and other related problems. For a diagnosis of PTSD, however, you need an “event.” Here is the first criteria from the DSM V:
Many civilians get it, from things like rape, car accidents, 9/11, etc.
“Events” happen all the time. If you can die by choking on a cookie, because it happens to go down the wrong way, I don’t see why you couldn’t get PTSD from pretty much any minor unpleasant surprise if you were in just the wrong psychological place when it happened. The fact that, in such circumstances, you might have difficulty in getting a proper diagnosis, is not really to the point.
I am sure it is much more common to get it from events that most people would agree are seriously traumatic, but the fact is that many people suffer very severe events and, psychologically, handle it fine, and others do not. Whether someone gets PTSD, the actual symptoms, is always going to depend on where the person’s head is at at the time quite as much as on the “objective” severity of the traumatizing event itself.
I don’t generally disagree. I’ve heard doctors debate it for hours in court, however. It usually doesn’t matter if the technical label “PTSD” applies or not, as you state, everyone is different and you can certainly have extreme reactions and not technically have PTSD. In one recent trial the question was whether you could get it from watching a video of an event where you were injured, if you have no memory of it. In another, my client thought she was going to die from an event that objectively, could not have killed her. I argued an empty guy pointed at her head would be just as traumatic as a loaded gun, if she didn’t know the difference.
The article says “usually suffered by war veterans”, not “only suffered by war veterans.” Whether that’s true statistically or not, I don’t know, but I thought I’d leap to the author’s defense on that point.
Incidentally, I live in the Seattle area. When the Daily Mail says “a Washington woman”, where the heck are they referring to? Is there a Washington in the UK? Are they referring to Washington, D.C.? Or somewhere in Washington State?
Googling the woman’s name, it looks like she’s in Washington, D.C. Is it too much to ask for journalist to spent an extra 4 nanoseconds to clarify that? Sheesh.
I thought the title was stupid and misleading…I mean, they are trying to summarize the story and the way it was written “… by WAR VETERANS” certainly seems like they’re trying to emphasize (literally) that it’s silly to think that people who are not WAR VETERANS don’t get PTSD.
It’s The Daily Mail. You know what they were getting at.
I don’t think this idea is foreign.
I know the maturity/intellectual level of teenagers are different, but look at the amount of kids that have killed themselves based on Internet hate.
While a tragic number, it’s a statistically insignificant one.
It can be presumed that teens who commit suicide already have serious emotional and/or mental issues. While the Internet might be the last straw, self harm probably wasn’t too far from their thought processes.
Actually, the DSM-V criteria are notable because the trigger no longer has to be a single event - it can be multiple smaller traumatic events. I don’t know whether that would make cyberbullying a potential trigger though.
Well, I would say that yes it would be possible for her to have PTSD. But do they recommend that soldiers or rape victims that suffer from this disorder revisit the events that caused the trauma in the first place? Are soldiers that suffer, sent back to active combat? Are rape victims encouraged to put themselves in similar situations that led to their attacks? I would expect not.
If twitter and other message boards are where Ms. Hensley suffered the trauma that caused her PTSD, why hasn’t her well regarded psychiatrist instructed her get off those mediums?
Possible reasons:
a. The psychiatrist believes Ms. Hensley now has better mental ability to deal with the onslaught of idiot trolls and misfits who triggered her disorder
b. The psychiatrist is a total fraud
And other options of course, but I know which of those two I’d pick. Having an online presence is fundamentally different from being in combat or experiencing rape, so just because “get back on that horse” isn’t recommended for those, means nothing for whether or not it’s recommended here.
There’s also the possibility that (s)he did tell her to stay off the Web, and she said no.