Abstract
Due to its personal, social, and economic phenomenology and its consequences, it is no surprise that PTSD has spread from the medical field to the social, popular cultural, and political discourse, in particular in US American culture. No TV show, no movie, or any other media format can be found, in which trauma isn’t a part of its narratives. Hence, if PTSD is to be approached analytically, it is not only important to consider its medical history, but also to consider (popular) cultural reflections on PTSD, since these are particularly important instruments to convey concepts of trauma in their media artefacts. In this paper, starting from a brief history of the medical development of the PTSD-diagnosis, we would like to draw attention to the political and social discourses of PTSD. Both aspects, medical definition and political-social reflection, have become an important topos of film and other popular cultural artefacts like comics or digital games. This analysis will focus on the predominant US American popular culture, as it is presumably the most important producer of popular culture media. The range of these adaptations is to be discussed here. Finally, we conclude with a theoretical framework of this reflection process.
This articles provides a completely revised and enhanced version of Görgen and Braune (2016)
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Notes
- 1.
For a deeper analysis and definition of the concept of frames, see for example Bednarek (2005).
- 2.
The name was given to the syndrome, because Erichsen mainly examined the victims of train accidents.
- 3.
It is also important to add that the described historical development is focused on military and veteran-related PTSD alone. Hence, in drafting the lines of a combat-induced PTSD, we ignore the existence of ‘civilian’ occurrences of PTSD. Accordingly, we, as researchers fall for the same stereotypes as it has been proven for the US jurisdiction, when ascribing PTSD to veterans only and not to civilians that have been exposed to traumatic events, even if epidemiological data tells us, that most trauma takes place in the non-military field (Purtle 2016). However, due to the focus and the limits of this paper, we chose to stick with the main narrative of combat-induced PTSD.
- 4.
Of course, we are aware of the many representations in other media, such as comics and games. Due to the limited space for investigation in this handbook, we can only refer to other studies, i.e. for comics Smith and Goodrum (2011) and Yamada (2014) or digital games Smethurst and Craps (2015) and Bumbalough and Henze (2016) and Görgen and Braune (2016).
- 5.
‘Acting like a Zombie’ is a typical description for the behavior of PTSD sufferers (Foley 2014).
- 6.
Oliver Stone’s Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979) also played a major role in PTSD’s portrayal. Both main characters, Captain Willard and Colonel Curtz prototypically show the (self-) destructive, symptoms of PTSD. The film depicts the inhumanity of the war and its consequences for the human psyche, as well as the involvement of the soldiers in a system of violence and madness; it also portrays how the individual dissolves in war and becomes a victim of political interests.
- 7.
Accordingly, he finds peace only when he is persuaded by Colonel Trautman to join him again and to return into the arms of the military.
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Görgen, A. (2019). The Medical, Social, and Cultural Construction and Production of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In: Görgen, A., Nunez, G.A., Fangerau, H. (eds) Handbook of Popular Culture and Biomedicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90677-5_26
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