Episode description

From a physician and post-traumatic stress disorder specialist comes a nuanced cartography of PTSD, a widely misunderstood yet crushing condition that afflicts millions of Americans.

The Unspeakable Mind is the definitive guide for a trauma-burdened age. With profound empathy and meticulous research, Shaili Jain, M.D. — a practicing psychiatrist and PTSD specialist at one of America’s top VA hospitals, trauma scientist at the National Center for PTSD, and a Stanford Professor — shines a long-overdue light on the PTSD epidemic affecting today’s fractured world.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder goes far beyond the horrors of war and is an inescapable part of all our lives. At any given moment, more than six million Americans are suffering with PTSD. Dr. Jain’s groundbreaking work demonstrates the ways this disorder cuts to the heart of life, interfering with one’s capacity to love, create, and work — incapacity brought on by a complex interplay between biology, genetics, and environment. Beyond the struggles of individuals, PTSD has a tangible imprint on our cultures and societies around the world.

In this conversation Dr. Shermer and Dr. Jain discuss:

• the history of PTSD and why no one talked about it after WWI, WWII, and Vietnam, but now we are
• how Dr. Jain diagnoses PTSD by characteristics presented by a patient
• how to treat PTSD through Cognitive Behavior Therapy through systematic desensitization
• the problem of tracking rates of PTSD because of the expanding bin of who is considered a victim of the disorder
• the difficulty of predicting deaths by suicide
• the difficulty of predicting who will suffer from PTSD, given the many people who have suffered severe trauma and not developed it
• why some stress is good for developing resiliency in life, but when too much stress causes harm, and
• the unseen costs of war.

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