Vietnam and the Elusion of Combat Trauma
On this day in 1973, President Richard Nixon announced the successful completion of the Paris Peace Accords, a treaty with North Vietnam that would end U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. [1] Over 2,700,000 American military personnel served in the war, almost 10% of their generation.[2] Over 58,000 of them were killed. [3] A 1983 study by the U.S. Congress found approximately 30% percent of men and 27% of women who served in Vietnam had experienced combat-related PTSD at some point in their lives since returning.[4] It's well known that war tends to generate a wide variety of technological and medical innovations. Certainly, conceptions and treatments of PTSD have evolved dramatically throughout the 20th century, as wars raged, and physicians and psychiatrists have struggled to understand and treat the symptoms of combat PTSD. In the article "From shell-shock to PTSD, a century of invisible war traumas," three philosophy professors discuss how comba
Posts
