PTSD Working Notes Entry 1

I don’t know how many of you know that I have been interested in learning psychology for the purpose of studying PTSD. It seems as though most current research is trying to find a cure-all method that will work for the majority of people. I read a book by Malcolm Gladwell titled Outliers: The story of sucess. It explained a few things that got me to thinking on the topic of interest.

The book talks about how language can account for some of the reason most Asian cultures are better at math. It talks about how the way the culture relates to power structure can have something to do with why some planes crash. It talks about how seemingly random advantages in sports can come down to arbitrary cut-off dates in the little leagues.

I got to thinking about those factors.

PTSD, to me, seems to be the subconscious trying to boot or delete information that doesn’t fit into the mind’s neat little picture of the world. Because the person is not dealing with the stimulus consciously, the subconscious is mulling it over. Your subconscious is what holds the constructs that have built “you” so it makes sense that it would need to work out the problem.

It has to do with how we learn. There are two ways we learn that I want to talk about, through repeated exposure or through cortisol responses to “life” threatening stimulus. I will likely go into these ideas in a later post.

What is perceived as normal to any given person has a lot to do with where they came from, who was there with them and their capacity for abstract thinking.

I wonder if there are a set of factors that could be determined about a person that could identify what kind of treatment is likely to work for individuals.

For instance, people from high context cultures are going to be less able to express clearly what they are going through both because of the power differential and because they naturally communicate through subtext. Also, many high context cultures are also community oriented which means it is likely that for people from those cultures and/or cultural backgrounds being in a support group with peers is likely to be more effective than one on one therapy with a psychologist.