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Post-traumatic stress disorder: supportive evidence from an eighteenth century natural disaster

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Brenda Parry-Jones  and
William Ll. Parry-Jones
Brenda Parry-Jones*
Affiliation:
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Glasgow
William Ll. Parry-Jones
Affiliation:
Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Glasgow
*
1Address for correspondence: Mrs Brenda Parry-Jones, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Yorkhill, Glasgow G3 8SJ.
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Synopsis

Post-traumatic stress disorder was first recognized as a diagnostic category embracing reactions in response to overwhelming environmental stress ‘outside the range of usual human experience’ in DSM-III (APA, 1980). Such abnormal stressors are by no means a product of the twentieth century but have featured, sporadically, in all societies from the earliest civilizations. Longitudinal investigations of traumatic stress have rarely gone further back than the nineteenth century, and have been concerned, almost exclusively, with adverse effects following railway accidents and military combat. The present study, utilizing a mid-eighteenth century medical source, presents an analysis of the impact of a natural disaster on members of a peasant family trapped in an avalanche in the Italian Alps in 1755.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , February 1994 , pp. 15 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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