The basic problem for a traumatized individual becomes his own self cure " bromberg(1994)

Today Is Not Tomorrow emphasises the centrality of temporal subjectivity to PTSD. The second portion of the title, PTSD Understories, indicates that there is a plurality of everyday experiences, relationships, situations, and sensitivities associated with PTSD that continues to be under-recognised. The potency of post-trauma art is not in any claim to own experience but to open in unique ways the politics of testimony and the affective valences of post-traumatic social life. What can art as a visual language tell us about the diversity and textures of post-traumatic experience?

The psychiatric system, in large part due to its reliance on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), has a tendency to pathologize ordinary human reactions to difficult life events, and to individualize treatments for "mental illness." This article builds on existing literature that is critical of psychiatry and proposes that art and stories that 'make strange' and elude easy interpretation may serve as a powerful counterpoint or complement to the 'standard way of doing things' when it comes to mental health care. Using military trauma as an example, this article highlights the inadequacies of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a diagnostic category; and, drawing from critical literature in the field and the author's own experiences working with groups of traumatized veterans, it illustrates how and why ancient mythology and modern art especially may serve as useful tools for those who are having problems with living. The 'disorienting dilemmas' and consciousness-raising discussions such works evoke have the potential to touch on vital, nuanced, and philosophical aspects of trauma and suffering that are too often overlooked by the psychiatric profession.

The Poetics of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature revisits the great American post-WWII, postmodern literary texts, namely Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), to fuse high literary theory and criticism with the conception of PTSD symptomatology—and the historico-political developments that dictated the formation of PTSD symptoms and their corresponding literary tropes. For the first time since the portrayal of PTSD as a product of narrative discourses, The Poetics of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature performs an inverse exploration. By identifying key postmodern literary tropes as products of an overarching PTSD narrative paradigm, this accessible and concise study: identifies unexplored aspects of the canonical novels at hand, such as the link between individual and collective traumatization; introduces a novel way of examining trauma at the intersection of narrative, history, and medicine that will be of interest to literary scholars, students, and medical practitioners within narrative medicine alike; and recalibrates the importance of postmodern politics of transformation, while making the case for an aesthetics of trauma.

Reflections on literature and trauma theory after 9/11 through a reading of the Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad's "first writing since."

ABSTRACT This reflective piece suggests three phases from therapeutic writing to full-fledged poetry to an audience's reading and discussion, illustrated with specific examples and commentary. The author, a social scientist, an adult educator and a published poet, begins with the role of writing in her own processing of the painful experience of a family member's severe mental illness and suicide, showing us her earliest therapeutic writing. She then illuminates a second phase, in which she gives us an inside look at the rewriting process that led to two poems suitable for public display. She considers how the resulting poems might be used for both therapeutic and educational purposes, offering discussion prompts and questions related to the poems.