Free Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland

and self-reported symptoms—and an investment in their fate—the study can’t exist. Unfortunately, given the frequent demographics of oppressors and the oppressed, one key to the study’s advancement has been one of the least credible and most dispensable populations of all: women.
    Ugh, women. Plaguing society with their hysterics. In Freud’s day, the young Sigmund vowed to solve the mystery of what made them act so crazy. Incredibly, after hundreds of hours of diligent, sensitive interviews, he figured it out. In a breakthrough 1896 paper, he announced that he had finally determined the root of the severe psychological symptoms of the women he was treating. It was one no one had anticipated, and no one turned out to want to know.
    It was sexual abuse. Hysteria wasn’t an innate psychological weakness, Freud found, but a result of horrors inflicted on its sufferers. According to his studies, the strongest, smartest minds were susceptible to it. In fact, one of his books posited that they were especially susceptible to it. His argument and evidence encapsulated the same findings of some of the best research done today. It was not well received.
    Given the prevalence of hysteria, the implication of Freud’s work was that someone , a lot of someones, were sexually molesting women and children, at all levels of society. Statistics would bear that out to be the case a hundred years later, of course, but the Establishment didn’t seem to be ready for it. It certainly didn’t embrace it. Freud was ostracized. It wasn’t until after he switched course, finding that the origin of his patients’ sickness was inside them rather than in their surroundings, that he was on the path to eternal fame. His original theories are as good as forgotten.
    During World War I, it was the soldier’s turn to become hysterical. The similar set of symptoms popped up with a prevalence that was impossible to ignore, and again, great minds set themselves on trying to solve the mystery of an invisible but incapacitating ailment. Must have been the shock of exploding shells on soldiers’ systems, doctors concluded. When that didn’t pan out, evidence-wise, they moved to calling traumatized men “moral invalids.”
    In 1943, when Lt. Gen. George S. Patton met an American soldier at an Italian hospital recovering from “nerves,” Patton slapped him and called him a coward.
    In 2006, the British Ministry of Defence pardoned some 300 soldiers who had been executed for cowardice and desertion during The Great War, having concluded that many were probably just crippled by PTSD.
    This tendency to blame a victim’s faulty wiring or physiology wasn’t new (and would never get old). During the American Civil War, it could hardly escape the military’s attention that soldiers were suffering from … something. Never mind that the Greeks had long ago put it together that perfectly good men could become “out of heart” and “unwilling to encounter danger,” and discharged them honorably; Civil War doctors, who couldn’t think of any other thing that might be unpleasant about fighting the Civil War but homesickness, diagnosed thousands with “nostalgia.” Eventually, a physician named Jacob Mendes Da Costa nailed down a solid explanation for their inability to carry on with daily activities, the uncontrollable panting and sweating and palpitations and fatigue. The symptoms Da Costa observed are today recognized as PTSD; many of his subjects were having panic attacks. But he saved the government—and the affected soldiers—a lot of trouble and embarrassment by assigning the blame to the circulatory system in his 1871 paper “On Irritable Heart: A Clinical Study of a Form of Functional Cardiac Disorder and Its Consequences.”
    As Herman explains, there’s good reason to befuddle and forget and muddy the conclusions of trauma studies, challenging the world order as real results do. War : Was there any justification for subjecting people to