50 Fun Facts About PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)

Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer coined which word in 1688 for the homesick misery of soldiers serving far away?

Nostalgia joins the Greek words for homecoming and pain, and doctors treated it as a real illness of Swiss mercenaries long before it came to mean a fond look back.

Which Victorian novelist was left nervous of train travel after surviving the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865?

Charles Dickens lost his voice for two weeks after the derailment and avoided trains when he could. He later turned the experience into his ghost story The Signal-Man.

Playing which classic puzzle video game soon after a car crash cut survivors' intrusive memories in one study?

Tetris is thought to compete with the fresh memory for the brain's attention, which disrupts how vividly the traumatic images are stored.

In which Marvel film does Tony Stark suffer panic attacks and nightmares after the alien invasion of New York?

Iron Man 3 shows a superhero with hypervigilance, bad dreams and a fear of crowds. One psychologist judged that Stark met every diagnostic criterion for PTSD while denying he could have it.

Tommy Shelby, a First World War veteran with PTSD, leads a Birmingham gang in which BBC crime drama?

Peaky Blinders makes Shelby's wartime trauma a thread that runs through the whole series: he served as a sergeant major and came home a changed man.

Prince Harry filmed a session of which trauma therapy, devised by Francine Shapiro, for an Oprah Winfrey documentary?

EMDR came to Shapiro on a walk in a park in 1987, when she noticed that moving her eyes from side to side seemed to take the sting out of upsetting thoughts.

Herodotus wrote of Epizelus, an Athenian soldier who went blind without being wounded, at which battle of 490 BC?

Marathon is where Epizelus fought in the Athenian ranks, and his case is now read as hysterical blindness: sight taken away by extreme stress, not by injury.

Which US general had to apologise after slapping two soldiers hospitalised with battle fatigue in Sicily in 1943?

George S. Patton did not lead troops in battle again until mid-1944, and one of the men he struck was later found to have malaria.

Samuel Pepys's diary describes intrusive, distressing symptoms after he lived through which disaster in his home city?

The Great Fire of London left Pepys with distress he kept recording in his diary. While it burned, he dug a pit in the garden to save his wine and a Parmesan cheese.

Sylvester Stallone plays which Vietnam veteran, whose flashbacks to wartime torture drive the 1982 film First Blood?

John Rambo first appeared in David Morrell's 1972 novel. On screen, rough treatment by small-town police sets off his memories of being a prisoner.

Which film star, hailed as World War II's most decorated US soldier, slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow?

Audie Murphy spoke candidly about his own battle fatigue to help veterans of Korea and Vietnam, and urged the government to study the emotional toll of combat.

Civil War doctor Jacob Da Costa blamed soldiers' breathlessness and exhaustion on an 'irritable' version of which organ?

Heart disease was the suspected cause for decades, under the nickname soldier's heart, until doctors reclassified the condition as psychiatric in the 1970s.

Which 2014 bestseller by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes how trauma reshapes people physically and mentally?

The Body Keeps the Score has been translated into dozens of languages and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for years, a rare run for a dense science book.

Krysten Ritter plays which Marvel private detective, living with PTSD after escaping the mind-controlling Kilgrave?

Jessica Jones has superhuman strength, yet her trauma drives the story: she has quit a brief superhero career and runs her own agency, Alias Investigations.

Which director's 1946 film about traumatised soldiers, Let There Be Light, did the US government suppress for decades?

John Huston filmed real patients, unscripted, at an Army hospital on Long Island. The documentary stayed on the shelf until the 1980s and was screened at Cannes in 1981.

Which war poet met his mentor Siegfried Sassoon while both were patients at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh?

Wilfred Owen had been diagnosed with shell shock, and at Craiglockhart he edited the hospital magazine, The Hydra, which printed poems by both men.

Which Pat Barker novel follows army doctor W. H. R. Rivers as he treats shell-shocked officers in Edinburgh?

Regeneration takes its title from Rivers's research into how nerves regrow, and it opened a trilogy whose final book, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize.

Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran haunted by visions of a dead friend, is in which Virginia Woolf novel?

Mrs Dalloway follows a single day in London after the First World War, and Septimus's story is a pointed criticism of how mental illness was treated.

Tom Lea's painting of a hollow-eyed Marine at Peleliu, printed in Life magazine, popularised which phrase?

Thousand-yard stare names the blank, unfocused gaze of someone overwhelmed by combat, although Lea's own title for the 1944 portrait put the distance at 2,000 yards.

Which professional body made PTSD an official diagnosis in 1980 by adding it to the third edition of its DSM manual?

The American Psychiatric Association acted as clinical studies of Vietnam veterans piled up. The name itself had only come into use during the 1970s.

Which part of the brain, responsible for detecting threats and storing fear memories, tends to be overactive in PTSD?

Amygdala activity ran higher in people with PTSD than in others when one study showed them photographs of fearful faces.

Which seahorse-named brain structure was a fifth smaller in one study of Vietnam veterans with PTSD?

Hippocampus is Latin for seahorse. It places memories in space and time, and one theory holds that when stress suppresses it, a memory can return as a flashback.

Prazosin, sometimes prescribed to ease the nightmares of PTSD, is also used to treat which physical condition?

High blood pressure responds to the drug because it widens the blood vessels. How the same medicine quietens bad dreams is still not entirely clear.

Sertraline, one of two antidepressants with US approval for treating PTSD, is best known by which brand name?

Zoloft is an SSRI, the family of antidepressants used as a first-line medicine for PTSD. They bring a moderate benefit to about half of the people who take them.

Before the DSM manual's fifth edition gave trauma its own chapter, PTSD was listed under which family of conditions?

Anxiety disorders lost PTSD in the 2013 update, which moved it into a newly named group, the trauma- and stressor-related disorders.

Which diagnosis covers trauma symptoms in the first month after an event, before PTSD can be diagnosed?

Acute stress disorder can be diagnosed from three days after the event. It may resolve with time, and PTSD is assessed only if symptoms last past the one-month mark.

Skip Rizzo adapted the combat video game Full Spectrum Warrior to treat veterans' PTSD using which technology?

Virtual reality puts the patient in a headset, steering a Humvee through recreated scenes of Iraq and Afghanistan while being safely exposed to what they fear.

In 2023, which country became the first to approve MDMA-assisted therapy as a legal treatment for PTSD?

Australia made the change in July 2023. A year later the US drug regulator turned down a similar application, citing concerns about trial design and safety.

Which Harvard psychiatrist set out the idea of complex PTSD in her book Trauma and Recovery?

Judith Herman drew a line between one-off traumas and the prolonged, repeated kind. The World Health Organization gave the second its own diagnosis in ICD-11.

Which month is PTSD Awareness Month in the United States, with National PTSD Awareness Day on the 27th?

June 27 was chosen because it was the birthday of Staff Sergeant Joe Biel, a North Dakota National Guard member who died after serving two tours in Iraq.

Hawkeye Pierce is treated in a psychiatric hospital after a wartime breakdown in the 1983 finale of which sitcom?

M*A*S*H closed with the most-watched single episode of any American television series, and its plot turns on a memory Hawkeye had buried after a bus journey.

Which American novelist landed at Utah Beach on D-Day and later checked himself into hospital for combat stress?

J. D. Salinger chose a civilian hospital in Nuremberg over a military one, because he did not want to be sent home with an Army psychiatric discharge.

Which 1978 Best Picture winner follows three Pennsylvania steelworkers scarred by captivity in Vietnam?

The Deer Hunter won five Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor for Christopher Walken as Nick, who drifts into Saigon's Russian roulette dens with PTSD.

Which Oscar-winning 1946 film follows three servicemen struggling to settle back into civilian life after World War II?

The Best Years of Our Lives won seven Academy Awards, and Harold Russell, who was not a professional actor, collected two Oscars for the same role.

Which Tolkien hero comes home to the Shire withdrawn and reliving the past, a pattern scholars compare to PTSD?

Frodo Baggins cannot settle back into ordinary life, and two years after the Ring is destroyed he sails away into the West. Medical and Tolkien scholars alike have made the PTSD case.

Roméo Dallaire has campaigned for understanding of PTSD since leading UN peacekeepers during which country's genocide?

Rwanda is the subject of his memoir Shake Hands with the Devil, and the retired general later spent nine years as a senator.

Jonathan Shay's 1994 book compares the combat trauma of Vietnam veterans with the warriors of which ancient epic?

The Iliad gave Shay his title, Achilles in Vietnam. He also coined the term moral injury for the harm done when those in authority betray what a soldier knows is right.

In 2006 the UK pardoned about 300 First World War soldiers, some of them shell-shocked, who had suffered which fate?

Executed for offences such as desertion and cowardice, the men were given a posthumous group pardon nearly ninety years after the war.

The word trauma comes from an ancient Greek word with which literal meaning?

Wound is still the everyday medical sense, which is why hospitals have trauma teams for serious injuries. The psychological use applies the same picture to the mind.

Which class of sedatives, the family that includes Valium, may worsen outcomes for people with PTSD?

Benzodiazepines bring short-term benefits that wear off with time and carry a risk of dependence. The World Health Organization advises against them soon after a trauma.

The DSM-5 sorts PTSD symptoms into four clusters: re-experiencing, mood changes, arousal, and which other?

Avoidance means steering clear of reminders of the trauma, and it can backfire: long-term avoidance of triggers makes a disabling level of PTSD more likely.

Which country's armed forces introduced the term 'operational stress injury' for the mental toll of service?

Canada wanted a non-clinical label that covers more than one diagnosis, and the term is now applied to first responders as well as military members.

In narrative exposure therapy, patients lay out a 'lifeline' with flowers for good events and what for bad ones?

Stones and flowers turn a life story into a physical object, made in the first session, which therapist and patient both use as a reference point.

Written sources from 1300 to 600 BCE show signs of PTSD in the soldiers of which ancient power?

Assyria's texts describe soldiers with flashbacks, disturbed sleep and low mood, which healers of the time blamed on the spirits of enemies killed in battle.

Tom Holland plays an Army medic who comes home with PTSD and turns to robbing banks in which 2021 film?

Cherry was directed by Anthony and Joe Russo and is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Nico Walker.

Ben Foster plays a veteran with PTSD who lives in a Portland forest park with his daughter in which 2018 film?

Leave No Trace was directed by Debra Granik and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, with Thomasin McKenzie as the teenage daughter, Tom.

Which Goon Show comedian was hospitalised with shell shock after being wounded at the Battle of Monte Cassino?

Spike Milligan was about to be promoted when he was hit by mortar fire, and an unsympathetic commanding officer demoted him afterwards.

Which animals, whose brains have an unusually large memory centre, are thought to suffer flashbacks and a form of PTSD?

Elephants give a bigger share of the brain's core to memory than humans or dolphins do, which may be why bad experiences return to them so vividly.

Psychiatric service dogs can ease a PTSD flashback with 'deep-pressure therapy', which means doing what?

Lying on top of the person gives a steady, calming weight. The dogs can also be trained to help a handler leave an overwhelming situation or to interrupt an anxious habit.

Jonathan Shay found an unusually accurate picture of PTSD in Lady Percy's soliloquy from which Shakespeare play?

Henry IV, Part 1 dates from around 1597, almost four centuries before doctors gave the pattern of symptoms in that speech a name.