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What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

nytimes.com

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Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#41

Post by evan_ »

mamon wrote: post #7
ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

I can certainly believe that there is more going on than just stress, and the argument that compression waves travelling through the brain can damage it is pretty compelling. The question then is how would you block it? How would you protect yourself from a compression (blast) wave such that it went "around" your head rather than through it. Is there some material that could conduct that energy preferentially?

It's not the matter of material but shape. Soldier would have to wear something that completely surrounds his head, like motorcycle helmet. Which is very uncomfortable to wear if you have to wear it all the time.

The article seems to imply even that wouldn't be perfect- shock waves can and do travel through the bloodstream.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#42

Post by SolaceQuantum »

adammunich wrote: post #39
Madmallard wrote: post #35

Or, get this, and this is super radical of an idea I know: There is not much of a separation between physical and psychological in the first place. Every part of the body is interconnected--as people develop disease, often times mental symptoms develop secondarily so. Depression and anxiety are super common in all sorts of illness states. There are numerous studies showing cellular dysfunction and rampant oxidative s…

I never understood why people rarely take this approach. It's not as if these things occur in isolation.

There is a long medical history of treating things in isolation in order to understand fundamental aspects of biology and such. While the rest of science has more or less moved on from this mindset, the medical field hasn't fully yet.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#43

Post by [deleted] »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #42
adammunich wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why people rarely take this approach. It's not as if these things occur in isolation.

There is a long medical history of treating things in isolation in order to understand fundamental aspects of biology and such. While the rest of science has more or less moved on from this mindset, the medical field hasn't fully yet.

[deleted]

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#44

Post by slr555 »

The title of this article extremely poorly chosen. The DSM-5 criteria for PTSD defines this condition in terms such that a great number of patients meet the criteria who have never been exposed to blasts of any kind. Yes, there may be significant numbers of patients like those the article describes who suffer from a previously uncategorized blast injury phenomenon that has sometimes been attributed to PTSD but the author is drawing the wrong Venn diagram for the reader. The new entity does not begin to subsume the entire PTSD population. This matters because too many patients whose symptoms have been stigmatized anyway will now be left with the impression that "real" PTSD is only associated with a history of blast exposure.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#45

Post by engx »

parasubvert wrote: post #26

I found this article interesting but frustrating. Conflating PTSD (a mental illness that is caused by traumatic experience) with concussive traumatic brain injury isn't helpful. I kept thinking it would be more interesting (and aligned to the headline) to look at PTSD sufferers brains when they didn't have a known physical injury to their brains.

Here's an interesting discussion between Dr. Mark Gordon, a retired Navy SEAL and the screenwriter of American Sniper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbxPxFiOIKc

http://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2012/1/Using-Hormones-...

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#46

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

kmm wrote: post #15
ruffrey wrote: post #12

With a background in philosophy and neuroscience, I cringe at articles like this drawing a distinction psychological and physical. They are simply the same thing.

It's still a useful distinction. That's like saying all software is hardware because the bits and bytes are stored in magnetic moments on hard drives etc... Or that biology and chemistry are the same thing because all living things are made of chemicals. Sure, there's some overlap, but the fields are still very distinct. Not to mention that the physiology of the mind isn't very well known. Physicalism of the mind isn…

"This is the secret of C's portability: it is the best representation of an abstract computer that we have. Of course, the abstraction is done over the set of real computers, not some imaginary computational devices." -- Alexander Stepanov

One can certainly quibble over the historical accuracy of this, but I think Stepanov describes a worthwhile principle. My sesnse is that a lot of clinical psychology is still trying to abstract over imaginary brains (often by boiling away all the nuance and ambiguity from some ancient philosopher's musings) instead of the set of real brains.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#47

Post by jcoffland »

The desire for such a distinction is strong. We prefer to attribute illness to physical causes because in our society we blame the patient for mental but not for physical illness. This disparity drives the push to find physical causes to which we can more comfortably redirect blame. Such as DNA, leptin, bacteria, enzymes, etc. It is wise to be skeptical of any new findings which fit too well with human desires and thus make "good" articles.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#48

Post by jcoffland »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #23
glibgil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop sending people to war would help

True, although I'm also concerned about people who are in the area when a bomb goes off (and there has been way too much of that lately). How much does damage? Is the damage reparable? What how far away must you be? If not reparable then treatable? The big data point here is the actual injury, vs the psychological injury.

Maybe we need to design more friendly bombs which only kill people in the blast radius (in a nice way) but don't compress the brains of those outside of that radius. Those soldiers launching bombs need a safe work environment. Perhaps we should get OSHA involved.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#49

Post by gnaritas »

> Physicalism of the mind isn't unanimously accepted in philosophy.

Much philosophy is just bad science. Pontificating over unanswerable questions is little more than a waste of time. Philosophy's greatest achievement was science, which is a better way to explore reality because logic alone isn't enough, it needs to be backed by evidence.

Physicalism is all that is known to exist, those asserting otherwise have no evidence to back their claims and are basically asserting magic.

Re: What If PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological? Evidence from new study

#50

Post by digi_owl »

adammunich wrote: post #39
Madmallard wrote: post #35

Or, get this, and this is super radical of an idea I know: There is not much of a separation between physical and psychological in the first place. Every part of the body is interconnected--as people develop disease, often times mental symptoms develop secondarily so. Depression and anxiety are super common in all sorts of illness states. There are numerous studies showing cellular dysfunction and rampant oxidative s…

I never understood why people rarely take this approach. It's not as if these things occur in isolation.

Mind-body duality have been a strong force in human society.

Heck, swap mind with soul and you may trace it as far back as we have "documented" history.

We have this strong resistance against seeing our thoughts, feelings and such as signal activity between a massive bundle of cells.

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