On Monday night the BBC broadcast a Panorama special programme which looked at the growing problem of suicide amongst serving soldiers and ex-soldiers (veterans) in the British military.1 Through its own research the Panorama team established that in 2012 a total of 50 soldiers – 29 of them veterans – …
One of the enduring legacies of the London bombings, whose tenth anniversary falls this July, is psychological. According to a recent BBC news story, ‘hundreds may have been traumatised’1 The key point about this story is that it is referring to people who may have just been ‘passing by’ when …
Research by the mental health charity Mind has shown that people working in the emergency (”blue light’) services are more likely to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) than the rest of the population.1 Perhaps this is hardly surprising bearing in mind the types of situations and sights that …
There are two ways to think about trauma. The first, and the one that I’ve consistently emphasised in the writings on this blog, is as a manifestation of the Real, as an encounter with the Real. In fact, to be traumatised is essentially to touch the Real (or perhaps it …
At one point near the end of the Watchmen graphic novel, and in the film of the same name, Dr Manhattan tells his companion and lover Laurie that he has been blinded by a shower of tachyons that he attributes to a nuclear bomb being detonated by the ‘villain’ of …
A while ago I wrote a post on trauma and, closely related to this, one on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One of the key points that I highlighted in those posts, and which I think is worth reiterating, is the fact that even though many people experience at least one …
In the end it all goes back to Freud. Not that he invented the term ‘trauma,’ far from it. In fact, it’s instructive to look at how Laplanche and Pontalis introduce the topic of trauma in their entry on the subject in The Language of Psychoanalysis: ‘Trauma’ is a term …
It is clear from clinical experience that many, if not all, people who present with depression have a experienced a significant loss in their lives. This may be the loss of a person, but it could also be the loss of a job, a house, or even an idea or …
Twenty years ago Howard Schwartz wrote a paper on the Psychodynamics of Political Correctness which might easily have disappeared into the academic graveyard along with all those other countless publications that no-one outside their particular sub-discipline would ever read in the first place. However, times change and today political correctness …
Boris Johnson’s now infamous article in the Telegraph regarding Denmark’s decision to ban the wearing of the burka and the niqab appears to have ignited yet again the whole question of how far one can go in a ‘free’ society in expressing views that are bound to offend at least …
