Of the Many Who Returned and Yet Were Dead

Abstract

To talk today of combatant suffering is to talk of PTSD. Since its inclu sion in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM-III) in 1980 — an acceptance based on the recognition that the suffering of veterans returning from the Vietnam War was more than just a political tool for pacifistic psychoanalysts protesting the war¹ — PTSD has afforded prac titioners, patients, and the public a way of universalizing, and a way of understanding, the effects of going to war. To return from war changed, to be unable to take back up once familiar routines and once close rela tionships was now to be seen as symptomatic of combat rather than as a personal failing or a sign of individual weakness. The ability to identify and classify symptoms then both opened the way for combatants and veterans to avoid the stigma of suffering in war, and further allowed for the diagnosis, treatment, and curing of this suffering.