Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

On the television series Grey's Anatomy, which comes on Thursday nights at 9:00pm on ABC, Dr. Owen Hunt suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Dr. Hunt was a medic in Iraq when all of his company was killed in an ambush. Upon his discharge from active service, he retuned to the United States and began practicing medicine as an Emergency Room (trauma) doctor at Seattle Grace Hospital in Seattle, Washington. He met and fell in love with Dr. Christina Yang who is a surgoen at Seattle Grace. One night while they were in bed, Owen was mesmerized by the blades on the ceiling fan and proceeded to choke Christina. In his mind the blades of the ceiling fan were helicopter blades, and he began reliving the nightmare of the attack in Iraq thinking that Christina was the enemy. Subsequently, Christina broke off her relationship with Owen and Owen started seeing a psychiatrist to help him deal with his problems. The doctor diagnosed him as suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder stemming from his feelings about being the lone survivor of the ambush in Iraq.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is covered in chapter 11 on page 434. According to the textbook, PTSD is a "disorder resulting from exposure to a major stressor, with symptoms of anxiety, nightmares, poor sleep, reliving the event, and concentration problems, lasting for more than one month." Women, especially under the age of 15, are more vulnerable to this disorder than men although the rate of PTSD has tripled since 2001 among combat-exposed military personnel, hence the storyline involving Dr. Hunt in Grey's Anatomy. Severe PTSD in children has been linked to a decrease in the hippocampus which as we studied in chapter 6 is important in forming long term memory. This decrease may have a negative impact on learning.