Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a term for an old problem. Solider have always suffered from horrors that they run into in combat. PTSD is a term that was coined around 1980 to talk about the emotional impact of those incidents on human being. And you see it particularly in veterans who have returned from heavy combat. In World War II, it was called “war neurosis,” things like that, “combat neurosis.”
But it became known as PTSD around 1980 when the Vietnam Veterans, and it’s very common unfortunately with veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, seeing heavy combat, seeing comrades killed. Unfortunately, it’s not a readily detectable problem because there are no external signs that someone suffers from it in the usual sense. It’s not like someone who is shot or wounded from a mine, so it’s a much more subtle problem to detect, but very disabling.
