National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey

Below are materials supplementing my story "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap," Scientific American, April 2009. (You can find the story here and my blog post introducing it here.) I'm starting with annotated sources, source materials, and a bit of multimedia. I hope to add a couple sidebars that didn't fit in the main piece -- though those may end up at the main blog, so you may want to keep an eye there or subscribe via RSS or Atom. Main sources and documents in "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap." These are organized by story section, roughly in the order the relevant material appears.…

My story in the April 2009 Scientific American story, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap", just went online. Here's the opening: In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens's problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: the condition was real enough, but as a diagnosis he saw it being wildly, even dangerously, overextended. [snip] "Clinicians aren't separating the…