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I had to shut down a company and lay off a dozen people, losing most of my savings and several years work. Friends have experienced much worse. These might not
by tlb 6y ago
I had to shut down a company and lay off a dozen people, losing most of my savings and several years work. Friends have experienced much worse.
These might not compare to the worst horrors of war, but they rank among life's agonies with getting divorced, or losing a parent. They can cause something like PTSD. It can take months or years to be ready to try something big again, and some people never bounce back.
Most people who haven't experienced that kind of failure can't appreciate how much it hurts. So it's worth seeking out people who have gone through big failures to commiserate with. There are lots of them out there. Few will post details online, because it's sensitive stuff that involves other people. So you have to talk 1-on-1.
- sneak 6y ago> They can cause something like PTSD. I believe that OP was asking about actual PTSD, which is thing with a specific definition and diagnostic criteria.
- elliottkember 6y agoStress caused by trauma is by definition post-traumatic stress. It is commonly associated with war, car crashes or other violence but bear in mind that trauma is fairly subjective.
- TheRealSteel 6y agoYes, but to be a disorder it has to meet specific criteria.
- ArtRichards 6y agoSpecific criteria set out by the DSM, the most recent version of which is essentially a checklist of symptoms for doctors to classify mental health on behalf of insurance companies for billing and labeling purposes. As a layperson, undiagnosed and untreated for any 'mental illness', and in my personal opinion, every new edition of this 'psychologists bible' demonstrates to me the entire point is quickly getting lost, and serves a different master than the wellbeing of patients. Its confirmation bias for my decision to go into technology rather than psychology, so take this with a grain of salt.
- eurasiantiger 6y agoNot so. Traumatic events can cause an acute stress disorder that begins immediately after the event, while post-traumatic stress disorder by definition has a latency of at least six months.
- hnuser123456 6y agoAll disorders are just labels trying to encompass the complexity of the entire human brain at every level. If you hear stories from people diagnosed with something and you're surprised by how much you relate to it, then you're surprised by how much you relate to it and can empathize on some level depending on how it impacted you and the person whose story you're comparing to. Or maybe you strongly relate but reject diagnosis for some reason. Maybe you feel you have a strong reason for this that isn't easy for others to understand, and maybe that's correct.
- itisit 6y agoEh, sorta? Clinicians take those "labels" seriously; they're more than a mere shorthand for the psychological experience(s) of an individual.
- staticman2 6y agoSome critics say psychological labels are invented, not discovered. The medical model of the human brain is good for billing insurance companies and standardizing clinician behavior i suppose but not necessarily an objective reality.
- itisit 6y agoWords ≠ reality...you don't say?
- staticman2 6y agoLaypeople word policing psychological terms on the internet is a weird rabbit hole if you buy the criticism the terms are arbitrary to begin with and don't really refer to reality.
- itisit 6y agoWhat is reality?
- dave_sullivan 6y agoGuy tells an interesting story from his own experience and this dude wants to quibble about specific definitions and diagnostic criteria, this is the pedantry HN is famous for.
- tolbish 6y agoGoing to have to disagree with you. There is a significant difference between going through something that really sucks, and being traumatized. Based on the information presented thus far, OP is going through the former.
- rl3 6y ago>There is a significant difference between going through something that really sucks, and being traumatized. Based on the information presented thus far, OP is going through the former. Yeah losing all your savings working on shit that didn't matter in the end while wasting years of your life isn't traumatizing at all. Glad you cleared that up for them. At what point does it become traumatizing? After a person in that circumstance falls into one hellish layer of depression after another and decides to finally end it?
- sneak 6y agoThere is a specific set of objective diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Nobody is saying that those experiences aren't traumatic or stressful. What we're saying is that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a specific thing with a specific definition, distinct from "the set of all people who have experienced trauma as the result of stress". https://www.brainline.org/article/dsm-5-criteria-ptsd https://www.brainline.org/article/dsm-5-criteria-ptsd
- rl3 6y ago>Nobody is saying that those experiences aren't traumatic ... The person I was replying to was saying exactly that. The fact there's a specific diagnostic criteria wasn't relevant. That said, you may find C-PTSD of interest: https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/essentials/complex_ptsd.asp https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/essentials/comple...
- tlb 6y agoNot even the most orthodox clinician claims that PTSD is a binary thing. It's a label for a continuum of experiences, and you can diagnose it if it affects daily life enough to benefit from treatment. The purpose of labeling disorders, whether it's PTSD, autism, or depression, is to be able to learn from related experiences. It's useful to talk about founders having post-traumatic stress because you can apply lessons learned from larger groups like soldiers and ER surgeons, both of which have large organizations studying their mental health, unlike startup founders. Labels also cause problems. People reject labels because they feel they are so unique that no other human experience could possibly shed light upon their own. They may be right about some intellectual aspect of themselves, but people's emotional systems are pretty darn similar.
- kodah 6y agoPTSD is a continuum and is not something that is clearly defined. The trouble that people get in is when they try to compare or apply hierarchy to trauma; eg: x > y where x, y are traumatic experiences. The whole activity seems rather pointless unless you're somehow trying to figure out what to treat first. That line of thought is fair when dealing with one individual with multiple traumas but when applied to a broader group it incentivizes downplaying and dehumanization. We used to do this a lot in the veteran community but I think folks have gravitated away from it.