Culture of Care and PTSD: A Multi-vector Approach to Diagnosis

The article is devoted to the challenges of psychotraumatization of a person and society in war. The emphasis is on how, through the interdisciplinary prism of medical anthropology, the landscape of research on post-traumatic stress syndromes related to the historical, regional and ethnocultural specifics of different military campaigns can look like. Observations and studies of wars and genocides of the 20th century left no doubt that such events cause not only physical, but also psychological damage to man and society. Evaluation, research methodologies, and ways to address these harms, however, remain a domain of debate and conflict of descriptions and interpretations across medical systems. The article problematizes post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a nosological unit of “Western” conventional medicine and as a component of the medicalist discourse about stress and the post-stress train of people’s experiences of difficult life events. A consensus is formed between psychologists and psychiatrists of different national schools that during each war a unique complex of stress reactions arises, to describe which both a common methodological base and the ability to take into account historical, regional, ethnopsychological specifics are needed. The medical-anthropological approach provides the necessary tools to describe various post-stress syndromes and thereby contributes to solving scientific and practical problems - targeted planning of assistance in overcoming the consequences of social crises. The author declares no conflict of interests.

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