by Casey FulkersonIn chapter 10 of The Encultured Brain, Erin P. Finley discusses post-traumatic stress disorder in male veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Finley take a more neuroanthropological approach, choosing to focus on cultural factors that influence the development of post-traumatic stress disorder.
What exactly PTSD is, how it develops from trauma, and how to diagnose and treat it are all topics hotly contested by experts. The “Authoritative understanding” of PTSD, as Finely refers to it on page 267, is that post-traumatic stress disease is a mental illness caused by the exposure to a traumatic event and that its symptoms are hyperarousal, reexperiencing, and avoidance / numbing. For an individual experiencing these symptoms to be clinically diagnosed with PTSD, their symptoms must prevent them from function normally. This “Authoritative understanding” provides a very rigid understanding of PTSD and suggests that exposure to a traumatic event solely dictates if an individual will develop PTSD. Finley takes a dramatically different multidisciplinary approach, drawing from anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and epidemiology to identify 6 variables that contribute to the development of PTSD: cultural environment, stress, horror, dislocation, grief, and cultural mediation. She combines these factors and their relationships with other another into one helpful figure, 10.1, on page 282. Ultimately these factors work together and influence each other to elicit a post-traumatic response. One advantage of Finley’s holistic model is that it opens more avenues for treatment (including things such as rituals and storytelling) rather than solely being limited to clinical intervention. Finley does not criticize the current diagnosis and treatment protocols used for PTSD. Instead, she acknowledges how many veterans have been helped using such protocols and uses her models to suggest that perhaps there is more to the story of PTSD and its treatment. One thing that I appreciated about Finley’s chapter is that she admits that she is only telling half of the story. By purposefully interviewing male veterans about their experiences with PTSD, she misses the perspectives and experiences of female veterans because women perceive and interact with their environments in different ways them men and so will have different trauma responses. For the purpose of what Finley is trying to accomplish, this one-sided view is not an issue. She is trying to show that there is more to PTSD than trauma, not assert that those 6 variables are the absolute causes of PTSD. Questions: How would the inclusion of women into Finley’s study provide a more complete picture of the effects of the 6 variables mentioned in the chapter on the development of post-traumatic responses? How did our culture get to the point where post-traumatic responses are viewed as negative and unacceptable? How would a more positive and de-stigmatized viewpoint of them change the process of healing?
4 Comments
Madi Moore
4/10/2019 06:30:55 am
The questions that you asked at the end of your review were exactly some of the questions I had as well. I would have loved to see women included in a study like this, but as you said, for Finley's purposes just studying men got her point across. Besides the six variables that Finley used in this chapter (cultural environment, stress, horror, dislocation, grief, and cultural mediators) are there other variables that the author could have chosen?
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Brian Rivera
4/10/2019 07:53:36 am
I have never considered PTSD in this much detail. I feel we got a deeply insightful account about how PTSD develops and is carried outside of the battlefield. One of the only things I felt was unclear throughout the chapter was the distinction between the description of PTSD and the approach to treatment. I think that in other chapter we have talked about the nature of a phenomenon separately from specifying whether it is bad or not. In this case there is an underlying assumption that PTSD should not be (and rightly so) but I felt that there is space to ask why do brains have such function that results in PTSD and how does it come about?
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4/23/2019 09:02:30 am
I loved the discussion we had in class on this chapter! In the future, I would definitely be interested to see how research on women with PTSD might be different from what we know about men's experiences with PTSD. I wonder if there might be fewer feelings of shame or a less extensive period of time of experiencing PTSD symptoms for women, as generally speaking in American culture women are more permitted to speak about and engage with their feelings than men. I definitely agree that if our culture was more accepting of post-traumatic responses, those suffering from PTSD might be better able to recover, or at least to find greater comfort and understanding from friends and family members. This topic reminds me of our class's discussion on autism, where we all admitted we were much less knowledgeable about the disease than we'd previously assumed, and that our increased understanding of autism even from one class discussion had changed our worldviews. I'm sure the same would go for PTSD with many people in our society.
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8/31/2021 05:24:41 am
i like this article , thanks for sharing and your effort
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AuthorThis blog is group authored by Dr. DeCaro and the students in his ANT 474/574: Neuroanthropology. Archives
April 2019
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