People casually throw around the words “PTSD,” “trauma,” and “triggered.” But as Virginia Eubanks explains, talking about the realities of trauma is completely different.
. I’ve cobbled together my understanding of the difference between men’s rates of PTSD and women’s from those three sources.
My understanding of the theory right now is that there’s three things that impact the likelihood of developing PTSD after a traumatic exposure. The first is prevalence—how often trauma happens. There are a lot more people, and mostly women, who experience sexual assault than there are people who experience being in combat service. In some ways it’s just kind of a numbers game, women experience more traumatic exposure than men do.
There was a lot of unsolicited advice in two categories. One was medical advice, the other was relationship advice. Lots of people who live with chronic illness or other disabilities have written a lot about why you might want to reconsider giving people unsolicited medical advice—there’s some great stuff, for example, on the website
on this topic. But just speaking from my own experience, I found unsolicited medical advice frustrating at best and at worst, really quite patronizing.This is true even for folks who have had experience with PTSD themselves and have found something that they feel really evangelical about, that really worked for them. If you found the perfect treatment and your PTSD greatly improved or even vanished immediately, amazing, I’m so, so happy for you, but that’s not what most people experience.