PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is one of the most talked-about conditions in mental health, yet the name itself is younger than many of the people who live with it. Soldiers, disaster survivors and writers described the same pattern of symptoms for centuries, under a long list of other labels, before medicine agreed on what to call it. This quiz collects PTSD fun facts in plain language. It covers the older names from past wars, the parts of the brain involved in fear and memory, the therapies and medicines used today, and the awareness campaigns that mark the calendar. It also looks at the soldiers, authors, films and television characters that shaped how the public pictures trauma. It is written for students, families, veterans' groups and anyone preparing an awareness event. The questions treat the subject with respect, and every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer coined which word in 1688 for the homesick misery of soldiers serving far away?
Nostalgia
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.
Q 02Which Victorian novelist was left nervous of train travel after surviving the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865?
Charles Dickens
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.
Q 03Playing which classic puzzle video game soon after a car crash cut survivors' intrusive memories in one study?
Tetris
Tetris is thought to compete with the fresh memory for the brain's attention, which disrupts how vividly the traumatic images are stored.
Q 04In which Marvel film does Tony Stark suffer panic attacks and nightmares after the alien invasion of New York?
Iron Man 3
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.
Q 05Tommy Shelby, a First World War veteran with PTSD, leads a Birmingham gang in which BBC crime drama?
Peaky Blinders
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.
Q 06Prince Harry filmed a session of which trauma therapy, devised by Francine Shapiro, for an Oprah Winfrey documentary?
EMDR
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.
Q 07Herodotus wrote of Epizelus, an Athenian soldier who went blind without being wounded, at which battle of 490 BC?
Marathon
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.
Q 08Which US general had to apologise after slapping two soldiers hospitalised with battle fatigue in Sicily in 1943?
George S. Patton
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.
Q 09Samuel Pepys's diary describes intrusive, distressing symptoms after he lived through which disaster in his home city?
Great Fire of London
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.
Q 10Sylvester Stallone plays which Vietnam veteran, whose flashbacks to wartime torture drive the 1982 film First Blood?
John Rambo
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.
Q 11Which film star, hailed as World War II's most decorated US soldier, slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow?
Audie Murphy
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.
Q 12Civil War doctor Jacob Da Costa blamed soldiers' breathlessness and exhaustion on an 'irritable' version of which organ?
Heart
Heart disease was the suspected cause for decades, under the nickname soldier's heart, until doctors reclassified the condition as psychiatric in the 1970s.
Q 13Which 2014 bestseller by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes how trauma reshapes people physically and mentally?
The Body Keeps the Score
Q 21Which part of the brain, responsible for detecting threats and storing fear memories, tends to be overactive in PTSD?
Amygdala
Amygdala activity ran higher in people with PTSD than in others when one study showed them photographs of fearful faces.
Q 22Which seahorse-named brain structure was a fifth smaller in one study of Vietnam veterans with PTSD?
Hippocampus
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.
Q 23Prazosin, sometimes prescribed to ease the nightmares of PTSD, is also used to treat which physical condition?
High blood pressure
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.
Q 14Krysten Ritter plays which Marvel private detective, living with PTSD after escaping the mind-controlling Kilgrave?
Jessica Jones
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.
Q 15Which director's 1946 film about traumatised soldiers, Let There Be Light, did the US government suppress for decades?
John Huston
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.
Q 16Which war poet met his mentor Siegfried Sassoon while both were patients at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh?
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen had been diagnosed with shell shock, and at Craiglockhart he edited the hospital magazine, The Hydra, which printed poems by both men.
Q 17Which Pat Barker novel follows army doctor W. H. R. Rivers as he treats shell-shocked officers in Edinburgh?
Regeneration
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.
Q 18Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran haunted by visions of a dead friend, is in which Virginia Woolf novel?
Mrs Dalloway
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.
Q 19Tom Lea's painting of a hollow-eyed Marine at Peleliu, printed in Life magazine, popularised which phrase?
Thousand-yard stare
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.
Q 20Which professional body made PTSD an official diagnosis in 1980 by adding it to the third edition of its DSM manual?
American Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association acted as clinical studies of Vietnam veterans piled up. The name itself had only come into use during the 1970s.
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.
Q 24Sertraline, one of two antidepressants with US approval for treating PTSD, is best known by which brand name?
Zoloft
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.
Q 25Before the DSM manual's fifth edition gave trauma its own chapter, PTSD was listed under which family of conditions?
Anxiety disorders
Anxiety disorders lost PTSD in the 2013 update, which moved it into a newly named group, the trauma- and stressor-related disorders.
Q 26Which diagnosis covers trauma symptoms in the first month after an event, before PTSD can be diagnosed?
Acute stress disorder
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.
Q 27Skip Rizzo adapted the combat video game Full Spectrum Warrior to treat veterans' PTSD using which technology?
Virtual reality
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.
Q 28In 2023, which country became the first to approve MDMA-assisted therapy as a legal treatment for PTSD?
Australia
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.
Q 29Which Harvard psychiatrist set out the idea of complex PTSD in her book Trauma and Recovery?
Judith Herman
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.
Q 30Which month is PTSD Awareness Month in the United States, with National PTSD Awareness Day on the 27th?
June
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.