Not 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 dail

Not 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.