Free Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland Page A

it? Women and children : Should they not be voiceless slave-toys? When trauma studies don’t find that the fault lies with the victim, and when they create space for those victims’ realities to be validated, an entire society becomes responsible. More specifically, usually, men do. And so the study was picked up for a time here and there with new wars and new waves of feminism but then, until recently, abandoned again as quickly as possible.
    Psychology got it together, in the face of a flood of Vietnam vets experiencing persistent mental issues, to make PTSD an official diagnosis in the DSM in 1980, uniting soldiers on the same page with traumatized civilians—who’d previously been assigned labels such as “accident neurosis” and “rape trauma syndrome.” Psychologists started to note that the symptoms were similar regardless of the cause. But popular awareness failed to follow suit. Ditto in the fourth estate. Certainly, I had not learned in school, or at work, the signs that you’ve experienced something that has affected you seriously or might precede a nervous breakdown. Had I any sort of cultural or professional knowledge about trauma, I might’ve known that the conditions of my assignments were risk factors for journalists’ developing PTSD: the number of traumatic assignments, and the height of their intensity, and low perceived social support and high organizational stress. I’d fought the date of my Haiti assignment, protesting on the ground of my exhaustion, but I might’ve insisted on more time off before leaving. I might’ve known that one of the strongest predictors of long-term PTSD is entering a dissociative state during a traumatic event. And that my continuing failure to adjust afterward was a normal, if not great sign. It is a true testament to national ignorance about PTSD that before I was diagnosed, I’d never heard of the concept but in passing reference to soldiers.
    It’s not a testament just because at least 4 billion people in the world will survive a trauma at some point of their lives, or because 89.7 percent of Americans are exposed to trauma by the DSM-V ’s definition, and an estimated 9 percent of those develop PTSD. Or because being in a war isn’t even close to the most common cause of PTSD in America. Violence against women—including sexual assault and domestic abuse—is. Among the civilian population, car accidents also top the list, and they could happen to anyone. My ignorance was a testament because I’d been part of one of the more collectively traumatized civilian populations in living American memory.
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    The Saturday before Hurricane Katrina started destroying New Orleans, my husband made me evacuate our house. That time, I had resolved to ignore the order; hurricane evacuations were expensive, with the driving and the hotels, and always for nothing. But my husband, an ecological engineer specializing in coastal geomorphology, knew damn well the open secret that the wetlands and levees wouldn’t hold in a strong storm, and his expertise won him our debate. We were all the way back in our native state of Ohio when it hit, having first gone to Mississippi and then realized we hadn’t gone far enough, and that it maybe was going to be a while before we could go back to Louisiana.
    Our displacement lasted several months—evacu-cation, some of us called it, because we were so funny, and since our jobs had ceased to exist. But after months of couch surfing and guest-room shuffling and not being sure if we could still graduate or reclaim employment, we returned.
    In December, after Christmas, we arrived back in a city like a war zone, bombed-out-looking empty houses everywhere. Even those four months later, in our miraculously unscathed duplex, the water rarely ran properly. Even by the next Mardi Gras, six months after the storm, we were collecting pots of it from a painstaking dribble of the kitchen faucet to put on the stove for a bath, since the