Federal laws explicitly addressing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have overwhelmingly focused on the needs of military personnel and veterans, according to a new analysis published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress.
The study, authored by Jonathan Purtle, DrPH, an assistant professor at the Drexel University School of Public Health, is the first to examine how public policy has been used to address psychological trauma and PTSD in the U.S., providing a glimpse of how lawmakers think about these issues.
Purtle found that in federal legislation introduced explicitly to address PTSD, an overwhelming majority of the language - more than 90 percent of the mentions of PTSD in these bills - showed efforts were targeted exclusively at military personnel. More than 90 percent of mentions of PTSD in the bills were likewise intended to address consequences of combat exposure.
This emphasis does not match with the frequency of PTSD in the U.S. population.
"Although trauma and PTSD are serious issues affecting military populations, the raw number of people affected by PTSD includes substantially more civilians simply because the civilian population is so much larger," said Purtle.
As an example, Purtle pointed to the specific language of the bill that created National PTSD Awareness Day. The text of that resolution describes PTSD as a "wound of war" that affects people in the military and does not acknowledge that PTSD exists among civilians.
[For more of this story go to http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/285312.php]
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