structural:expansion, linguistic:paraphrasing, quality:correction
History

Aspects of PTSD in soldiers of ancient Assyria have been identified using written sources from 1300 to 600 BCE. These Assyrian soldiers would undergo a three-year rotation of combat before being allowed to return home, and were reported to have faced immense challenges in reconciling their past actions in war with their civilian lives.

Connections between the actions of Viking berserkers and the hyperarousal of post-traumatic stress disorder have also been drawn.

Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has proposed that Lady Percy 's soliloquy in the William Shakespeare play Henry IV, Part 1 (act 2, scene 3, lines 40–62), written around 1597, represents an unusually accurate description of the symptom constellation of PTSD.

A study based on personal letters from soldiers of the 18th-century Prussian Army concludes that combatants may have had PTSD.

Many historical wartime diagnoses such as railway spine, stress syndrome, nostalgia, soldier's heart, shell shock, battle fatigue, combat stress reaction, and traumatic war neurosis are now associated with PTSD.

The correlations between combat and PTSD are undeniable; according to Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, "One-tenth of mobilized American men were hospitalized for mental disturbances between 1942 and 1945, and, after thirty-five days of uninterrupted combat, 98% of them manifested psychiatric disturbances in varying degrees."

The DSM-I (1952) includes a diagnosis of "gross stress reaction", which has similarities to the modern definition and understanding of PTSD. Gross stress reaction is defined as a normal personality using established patterns of reaction to deal with overwhelming fear as a response to conditions of great stress. The diagnosis includes language which relates the condition to combat as well as to "civilian catastrophe".

The addition of the term to the DSM-III was greatly influenced by the experiences and conditions of U.S. military veterans of the Vietnam War. In fact, much of the available published research regarding PTSD is based on studies done on veterans of the war in Vietnam.

Because of the initial overt focus on PTSD as a combat related disorder when it was first fleshed out in the years following the war in Vietnam, in 1975 Ann Wolbert Burgess and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom defined rape trauma syndrome (RTS) in order to draw attention to the striking similarities between the experiences of soldiers returning from war and of rape victims. This paved the way for a more comprehensive understanding of causes of PTSD.

Early in 1978, the diagnosis term "post-traumatic stress disorder" was first recommended in a working group finding presented to the Committee of Reactive Disorders.

A USAF study carried out in 1979 focused on individuals (civilian and military) who had worked to recover or identify the remains of those who died in Jonestown. The bodies had been dead for several days, and a third of them had been children. The study used the term "dysphoria" to describe PTSD-like symptoms.

After PTSD became an official American psychiatric diagnosis with the publication of DSM-III (1980), the number of personal injury lawsuits (tort claims) asserting the plaintiff had PTSD increased rapidly. However, triers of fact (judges and juries) often regarded the PTSD diagnostic criteria as imprecise, a view shared by legal scholars, trauma specialists, forensic psychologists, and forensic psychiatrists. The condition was termed "posttraumatic stress disorder" in the DSM-III (1980).

Professional discussions and debates in academic journals, at conferences, and between thought leaders, led to a more clearly-defined set of diagnostic criteria in DSM-IV (1994), particularly the definition of a "traumatic event". The DSM-IV classified PTSD under anxiety disorders. In the ICD-10 (first used in 1994), the spelling of the condition was "post-traumatic stress disorder".

In 2012, the researchers from the Grady Trauma Project highlighted the tendency people have to focus on the combat side of PTSD: "less public awareness has focused on civilian PTSD, which results from trauma exposure that is not combat related..." and "much of the research on civilian PTSD has focused on the sequelae of a single, disastrous event, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, September 11th attacks, and Hurricane Katrina ". Disparity in the focus of PTSD research affected the already popular perception of the exclusive interconnectedness of combat and PTSD. This is misleading when it comes to understanding the implications and extent of PTSD as a neurological disorder.

The DSM-5 (2013) created a new category called "trauma and stressor-related disorders", in which PTSD is now classified.

America's 2014 National Comorbidity Survey reports that "the traumas most commonly associated with PTSD are combat exposure and witnessing among men and rape and sexual molestation among women."