Nautilus

Can PTSD Be Good for You?

There’s no way to be sure what will traumatize someone, and not everyone exposed to “trauma” develops PTSD.Wikicommons

You might think it insensitive or even offensive to ask whether PTSD could be good for someone. Who wants a disorder, let alone one caused by “post-traumatic stress”? Yet when Nautilus posed this question to Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City—where she’s worked with war veterans, Holocaust survivors, and other trauma victims—she said, “I don’t know.”

That ambivalence partly stems from the fuzzy concept of “trauma.” There’s no way to be sure what will traumatize someone, and not everyone exposed to “trauma” develops PTSD. “We’re now having a conversation about whether all the effects

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus3 min read
Making Light of Gravity
1 Gravity is fun! The word gravity, derived by Newton from the Latin gravitas, conveys both weight and deadly seriousness. But gravity can be the opposite of that. As I researched my book during the sleep-deprived days of the pandemic, flashbacks to
Nautilus5 min read
The Bad Trip Detective
Jules Evans was 17 years old when he had his first unpleasant run-in with psychedelic drugs. Caught up in the heady rave culture that gripped ’90s London, he took some acid at a club one night and followed a herd of unknown faces to an afterparty. Th
Nautilus10 min read
The Ocean Apocalypse Is Upon Us, Maybe
From our small, terrestrial vantage points, we sometimes struggle to imagine the ocean’s impact on our lives. We often think of the ocean as a flat expanse of blue, with currents as orderly, if sinuous, lines. In reality, it is vaster and more chaoti

Related