My PTSD Is Mine Only

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Science seeks similarities.

Only through patterns can it label pain: a migraine, not just a headache. Crohn’s, not colitis. One type of cancer over another.

Psychology and psychiatry try to work the same way.

You answer checklists. You fill out scales. You’re observed and measured.

As if the soul could be scanned. X-rayed. Biopsied.

As if it could be weighed, quantified, converted into data.

AI-generated illustration of a man looking at an x-ray with a flower where the heart should be. Black and white charcoal style.

But the soul doesn’t like to be mapped.

Trauma doesn’t submit to categories.

It doesn’t fit criteria.

It is wild.

It is intimate.

It is always, always personal.

Not long ago, even love was listed as a disorder.

Homosexuality was labeled an illness. A deviation. A pathology.

And then, under pressure from the LGBTQ community, it was removed from the manual.

Not because it changed, but because the world did.

If something as essential as love could be misdiagnosed, what hope does trauma have?

The trauma I live with is mine.

Some of my symptoms resemble “classic” PTSD.

Many do not.

Psychiatrists recommended cannabis.

“There’s no conclusive research, but many patients report improvement,” they said.

I told them I used to be addicted — to weed, to other drugs — and that my PTSD erupted while I was using.

They still pushed for it.

Because now everyone’s talking about cannabis as a cure.

I have nothing against it. But like anything, it’s not for everyone.

One psychiatrist — a hospital director, no less, told me I had Generalized Anxiety Disorder, not PTSD.

Fine, I said. Let’s call it that.

Then I had a violent flashback in the middle of a grocery store.

I fought off four men trying to restrain me, but I wasn’t fighting them.

I didn’t see them.

All I saw was darkness.

All I felt was war.

So, I was back to PTSD.

Back to “combat shock.”

Back to a name that didn’t help much but at least sounded closer to the truth.

Science can replace a heart. A lung. A liver.

But sometimes it can’t cure eczema. Or a fungus under the nail.

How can we expect it to always know what to do with the soul?

I believe in the person who listens inward.

Who knows that while we’re all a little alike

we’re also entirely different.

Each of us is like a yellow wildflower growing in the middle of a manicured lawn.

Our pain is our own.

Our trauma is ours alone.

Sometimes, a single detail a sound, a glance, a word, changes the entire picture.

So please, stop saying “this is normal for PTSD,” or “you’re just like that other guy.”

Because maybe I’m a little like other trauma survivors

but I’m also completely different.

My PTSD must be treated as if it’s the only one in the world.

Because it is.

Because it’s mine.

And mine alone.

***

Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

53 COMMENTS

  1. A brief poem or sketch can often convey truth more eloquently and forcefully than an entire long-winded opus.
    That’s true of Mr. Ron’s depiction of emotional trauma, a complex phenomenon which defies attempts by reductionist biomedical psychiatry to divide it into discrete DSM categories.
    Emotional suffering is unique to the individual and thus should not be conceptualized with the use of generic mental health labels, particularly for the purpose of insurance reimbursement.

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    • Thank you, Joel.
      Your words truly mean a lot to me. I’ve come to believe that what breaks us can’t always be named, and that poetry – or any form of art, can sometimes reach where language and diagnosis fall short. I deeply appreciate your understanding of that tension between suffering and the systems that try to contain it.

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  2. I’ve always hated psychologists, probably had a bad experience, most lack emotional intelligence some just stupid…
    Besides formal education there’s more. You need to really listen, its the same with treatment its the same with friends and its the same with relationships.
    Because we all like to be heard, we all have our problems and things we are going through and like you said, we are all different.
    Thank you so much for writing this amazing text! Sending love!!

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      • You’re welcome, Yishay. I loved what you wrote.

        It was only after my having read a review of a book called “The Evil Hours” that I began listening more closely to my own lifelong doubts about psychiatry’s medical model. The book was written by David J Morris, a former marine who lives with PTSD. He writes about the limits of psychiatry and the overconfidence of the people who practice it, especially the ones who have no idea what it’s like living in a war zone.

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  5. PTSD. The ‘P’ is for Permanent. This world is made war of all against all by powers that (shouldn’t) be. Peace comes when we recover the personal relations which heal our and the world’s wounds.

    “The basic word I-Thou can only be spoken with one’s whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one’s whole being.”
    -Martin Buber

    “A moment of reverence is a moment of self-consecration. They who sense the wonder share in the wonder. They who keep holy the things that are holy shall themselves become holy.”
    -Abraham Joshua Heschel

    “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
    -Dorothy Day

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  6. Thank you, Mila.
    What you wrote really touched me. I agree, listening is everything. No degree can replace genuine presence, empathy, or the courage to see another person’s pain without trying to fix it. I’m so glad the piece resonated with you. Sending love back your way.

    Warmly,
    Yishay Ishi Ron

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  7. I consider myself to be 75% schizophrenic and 25% bipolar. A diagnostic cannot comprehend all the complexities of human suffering, which we only make worse by pathologising it.

    For your healing journey, yes, compassion heals trauma. So, if you cannot have compassion for yourself, think of someone having compassion for you, perhaps a Buddha of infinite compassion like Avalokiteśvara.
    If guilt blocks compassion, try to forgive yourself, imagine your friend forgiving you. Hard I know. Perhaps he’s already forgiven you for a long time, where he is.

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    • Without denying the emotional distress you are experiencing, I don’t understand how you can possibly quantify it in terms of percentage points, especially as the very diagnoses of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are themselves problematical. I’m not aware of any form of psychotherapy (which does not employ rigorous laboratory tests and findings to corroborate hypotheses) that is able to make such precise calculations.

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    • Thank you, Jean-Philippe.
      You speak with rare tenderness and truth – a reminder that diagnoses can never contain the vastness of human pain or grace.
      Your words about compassion resonate deeply. Sometimes imagining another’s mercy toward us is the first step toward finding our own.
      I believe your friend already knows that peace.

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    • Nothing I write is political. Every year, thousands of combat veterans in the United States die by suicide. My work isn’t about the Israeli – Palestinian conflict – it’s about the conflict within the human soul.
      There’s no need to bring politics into everything. Mad in America is a platform for exploring human suffering and healing, not for political debates.

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      • The problem is that the israeli military hasn’t been doing much of any good ever since they started existing, and there is a huge imbalance in the value placed in people’s suffering depending on who is suffering. And right now there’s a glaring imbalance where israeli suffering is the only suffering that matters. Saying “I care about all people” isn’t enough.

        The Palestinians will never have justice until we acknowledge them, their pain, who is causing it, and there are consequences. There’s nothing traumatizing the israeli military would put people through that humanizes them when they overwhelmingly have existed to abuse the Palestinians ever since the 40s.

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        • Your concern for the fate of the Palestinians is most commendable.
          But have you also expressed equal concern over the fate of the approx. 800,000 Jews persecuted in and expelled from Arab lands since the 1940s, the massacre, rape, and displacement of Negros by Janjawid militia in Sudan, the decades-long genocide of Kurds perpetrated by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the bloody suppression of dissidents by Bashar Asad in Syria, and the bombing of Yemeni civilians by the Saudi air force, among numerous other atrocities committed in Muslim countries over many decades? Or is it only the unconscionable actions on the part of Israelis that arouse your righteous indignation?
          It has always been my understanding that the MIA is meant to serve as a forum primarily for critics and victims of the mental health industry to voice their opinions.. I hope it doesn’t degenerate into a platform for those who want to air their political grievances and ethnic prejudices. There are other websites that are far more appropriate for that sort of acrimony.

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          • COMMENTING AS MODERATOR: I think it is time we got back to the mission of the organization, to critique/deconstruct/dismantle the current “mental health system.” Further political commentary is going to be declared off topic and not published.

            —-Steve

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          • I do care about all those things. But this website is also about social justice, isn’t it? A site about social justice CANNOT be nonpolitical. And it’s unfairly biased in whose suffering it seems to care about. And that’s not just.

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  13. Thank you.

    Regarding combat PTSD my first and main priorities are those of the victims of war and certainly not its perpetrators and elite soldiers. And Gazans most certainly cannot simply walk away to a safer environment – there is no “post-trauma”

    Pretty strange to host this here especially in this day and age.

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    • Thank you for your comment, Kai.

      My work doesn’t aim to justify or glorify anyone’s role in war – quite the opposite. It tries to expose the damage that war inflicts on all human beings, including those who fight in it. The pain of victims and perpetrators is not the same, but both are part of the same tragedy.

      I don’t write about politics or national conflicts. I write about trauma – the war that continues inside the mind long after the shooting stops. Mad in America is a space for discussing the psychology of suffering and healing, not for political debate.

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  14. Thank you for your comment, Kai.

    My work doesn’t aim to justify or glorify anyone’s role in war – quite the opposite. It tries to expose the damage that war inflicts on all human beings, including those who fight in it. The pain of victims and perpetrators is not the same, but both are part of the same tragedy.

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    • Thank you, Ina. I hear the grief and the anger. I don’t believe psychiatry “doesn’t work,” but I do believe too many of us were offered medication and labels instead of listening, truth, and long-term care. Veterans are forcing that conversation into the open, and I’m grateful for that. My hope is not to erase psychiatry, but to humanize it, and to widen the path to healing: trauma-informed therapy, community, meaning, art, and, yes, humility from the system.

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        • Thanks, Steve. I don’t say “psychiatry doesn’t work” because some things do work, for some people, for some goals: acute sedation in crisis, short-term relief, a pause that lets someone catch breath. But I also think psychiatry often “works” for the system more than for the person: it produces codes for insurers, compliance for institutions, and tidy narratives that ignore trauma.
          For me, the problem is what we call success. If the metric is “reduced symptoms for 6–8 weeks,” fine. If the metric is agency, meaning, relationships, long-term quality of life, the record is mixed and sometimes harmful, overdiagnosis, polypharmacy, difficult withdrawals, and coercion disguised as care.
          So I’m not defending the status quo. I’m arguing for honest framing and real choice: informed consent (including taper/withdrawal risks), trauma-focused therapies, peer support, community, movement, art, time, alongside meds when the person chooses them. Less certainty, more humility. That, to me, is care that works.

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          • Sometimes drugs may work in a way the client wants. That doesn’t mean psychiatry works. Psychiatry is a system based on a set of assumptions that are flat out wrong and destructive. Drugs have always been around, and the use of substances to modify consciousness is as old as mankind itself.

            The fact that psychiatry focused on symptom reduction is not an error, it’s a part of the plan to medicalize distress. And to me, “misdiagnosis” is a misnomer when it’s impossible to objectively determine a diagnosis in the first place. I have no problem with the short-term use of drugs to help folks get through a tough period. But psychiatry is institutionally planned to actually do things that are counterproductive in order to make money and establish control of the marketplace. Psychiatry as a whole does NOT work, and many of the things you seem to consider flaws are actually features of the system, and will never be changed until the basic assumptions of psychiatry are dumped in the metaphorical toilet. And flushed twice!

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      • I don’t believe that psychiatry, the “science of lies” (Thomas Szasz’s apt term for it), can be “humanized.”
        I recommend that you read Jeffrey Masson’s excellent book “Against Therapy: The Myth of Emotional Healing” for a thought-provoking discussion of the fallacies and abuses of the mental health field.

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        • I don’t think psychiatry can be redeemed by nicer slogans; I think it can only be made humane by constraints: no coercion, real informed consent (including taper/withdrawal risks and uncertainty), trauma-first formulations instead of diagnosis-first, time-limited meds when the person chooses them, open notes, peer support, family/community over institutions, and outcomes measured in relationships and agency, not in 6-week symptom graphs.
          If a system can’t meet those terms, I’m with you: better to walk away and build elsewhere. But I’ve seen pockets where this is happening, and people suffer less. That’s the ground I’m standing on.

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  16. Everyone is leading a life of quiet desperation when they are not screaming, and fighting their own inner battles, until they are not.

    Suffering ends, seemingly, but the wish to share all we have learned may never end – always assuming that these actually are the very best of all possible or impossible worlds, after all?

    “Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary.”

    Eckhart Tolle, “Stillness Speaks.”

    Thank you for a wonderful essay or poem, and for all the spaces.

    Peace.

    Tom.

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    • Thank you, Tom.
      I recognize that “quiet desperation” you describe, the war most of us fight in silence. I’m not sure suffering is necessary, but I do know that once it arrives, what we do with it matters. Sometimes the work is to stop arguing with pain; sometimes it’s to refuse its terms.
      And yes, the spaces: they’re where breath returns, where meaning sneaks back in between words.
      Grateful for your reading, and for this kindness.

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  17. Hello Yishay, Well said. I am not sure if I have already offered this to you, but I would be pleased to send you an email to a free link to my self-help EMDR program. As you write, everyone brings their own personal trauma experiences to the program. All are different, and you do not have to verbally share it with anyone. Write to me if you would like it, or if you have questions: [email protected].

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  18. Thank you, Yishai –

    I appreciate your emphasis on each individual’s story, the importance of recognizing, sharing it and sometimes having someone else hear it. I agree that the “mental health” world has taken the wrong approach for years, implying that these are disorders/diseases… and not focusing on the specifics of what someone says about their life.

    This is exactly why some of us psychologists in Connecticut set up a nonprofit, Volunteers In Psychotherapy, where we don’t work in the insurance or healthcare systems. VIP clients earn no-fee therapy in exchange for volunteer work they provide independently and privately for the charity of their choice.

    No reports are sent to insurers, people have strict privacy and maintain all their civil rights in a fully voluntary system that’s functioned for over 26 years now. Most importantly, this preserves the privacy and time for someone to discuss these unique complexities in their life.

    Rich Shulman

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    • Thank you, Richard.
      What you’ve built with Volunteers In Psychotherapy sounds exactly like the kind of dignified care I’m arguing for, privacy, agency, no billing codes, and time to tell a real story. The “earn your therapy by helping others” model is beautiful: it restores rights and restores meaning. Grateful for your work, and for reminding us that alternatives already exist, and have for decades.

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  19. Midge over Mind over Matter?

    Is it a question of “mind over matter,” or of something else over mind?

    In “The Art of Happiness,” as I recall, psychiatrist Howard C Cutler asks the Dalai Lama if every thought is not the product of biochemical reactions in the brain.

    The Dalai Lama, as I recall, asks if it might not be the other way around – too?

    Neuroscience, as I understand it, preaches that we bags of brain chemicals go about seeking our hits of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, endocannabinoids, epinephrine, not-epinephrine etc.

    Those bags we disagree with, we may write off as them vs us, and, through the use of any labels, seek to demonize or dehumanize them, so justifying out attacks on them, of course:

    “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities.”

    How do we have a pee?

    Don’t we move mountainous molecules of neurotransmitters about our brains in order to bring about the depolarizations of those resting membrane potentials in all the necessary nerves in all all the exquisite choreography required?

    How do we do that?

    How do we learn to take conscious control of that – possibly before forfeiting that control again?

    Sure, mind can move molecules of matter, but can we not move and slow and stop and redirect our very minds, too?

    As a teenager, I used to try and grin and bear midge bites , and failed miserably and gave up trying.

    When I heard that certain (Donegal) farmers could “thole” or tolerate midge bites without the least apparent distress, I tried again, and failed again, and wondered if those individuals really felt what I felt, or were somehow immune.

    Only later, on reading that those bites triggered an immune response, in most folks, with a growing histamine release, did it make sense.

    If physical pain = sensation +fear,

    and if the growing sensation due to growing histamine release occurs despite one’s best effort to control one’s emotional reaction, it can be discouraging – it can erode our courage and so grow our fear, our resistance, and so our pain.

    https://youtu.be/qINdA6E14Sk?si=9cuksxiE7he2rO3d

    Once we have a deeper understanding of what’s going on, we may find more courage than we ever knew before?

    Our state religion, psychopharmacology or psycho pharmacology, “pharmacracy,” would have us believe that we are our minds, that the psyche is the mind, and no more.

    If we see the mind as our sensations, perceptions, thoughts and emotions, however, we may accept that this is merely one aspect of our overall awareness or Consciousness, whatever that may be.

    We may then agree with those who define ego as our unobserved minds, our unobserved thoughts and emotions – and wonder, “Unobserved by whom, or by WHAT?”

    A newborn infant, like other newborn mammals, may learn to suckle without any sense of wonder.

    Then, one fine day, by accident, at first, she may learn, by clapping her hands, to make a noise.

    Her mom and she may consider this a miracle – until they grow so familiar with it that they no longer do so.

    I knew a girl whose brother was about a year older. She told me that, as infants, they had a race to see you could potty train first. Ellen won, of course.

    I believe we can all be and so all will do immeasurably better now, as we all come to realize that we are all immortal human beings, and not mere mortal human thinkings or human doings.

    I think the only difference between “them” and “us” is that they die, we never do, if you follow what I am coming to…

    Quantum suicide and immortality – Wikipedia https://share.google/qmb3YOxJ2lPHvZpt3

    Comfort and joy and love and laughter!

    Tom.

    “I know except where I am. I was lost here before.”

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    • Thank you, Tom.
      You’re circling a question I care about: is it “mind over matter,” or something deeper than mind guiding both? I don’t know. What I do know is this:

      Labels can become weapons. Once we reduce a person to a code or a chemistry, it’s easy to justify harm.

      Brains are real; meaning is real. Neurochemistry explains mechanisms; it doesn’t exhaust experience. Pain = sensation + fear, as you note, but also + story. When the story changes, the chemistry often follows.

      Agency is small but non-zero. We can’t will away histamine or panic, but we can widen the gap between signal and surrender, breath, attention, relation, sometimes medication, sometimes silence.

      Humility beats “pharmacracy.” I don’t reject biology; I reject biological supremacy. Any honest care has to hold body, mind, and what you call Consciousness in the same room.

      As for immortality, I’ll leave that to philosophers. My project is simpler: keep people human while they’re here. Less certainty, more listening. Fewer labels, more witness.

      Peace back to you,

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      • Yishay or yoshay, heartfelt or soulfelt thanks, or both

        What you call “soul” in your poem above, may be what I call Consciousness, and may be the only way I. Which we are all equal, and all one, even while our (unobserved or egoic) minds divide us

        What you call suffering may be what I might call acute, severe suffering or stress: I see anything less than accelerating, deepening, intensifying Bliss as suffering.

        What you call agency, I am unsure of, but call agency might even be almost synonymous with soul – that which is aware and can direct action or thought accordingly.

        What you call a philosopher, I might call a professional or paid, academic philosopher.

        If a philosopher is one who seeks Wisdom, Sophia, Enlightenment, Salvation, Nirvana, Bliss, End of Suffering, Freedom from Fear, then I believe we are all destined to destined to become philosophers and to find Bliss, because we are not doomed to remain
        combatants.

        In Jill’d first TED talk, I believe the trust part of her presentation is also the least scientific, and the most misleading bits those most steeped in contemporary neuroscience, corrupted as it is by psycho pharmacology and by both their Judaeo-S/Pauline origins.

        Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight | TED Talk https://share.google/OrHJ8Zy0E63eozUzR

        Much love.

        And thank you!

        Tom.

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  20. Thank you for putting into words what so many people don’t understand. Dealing with my own PTSD is daunting. As you said, anything can bring on an episode. I have had to explain it to others, after I figured it out. These days, my fight is internal. I stay in my apartment most of the time. I go out with my boyfriend once or twice a week, he is my rock. He is what I think about when the world closes in one me, my life line

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  21. Thank you, Margaret.
    What you wrote is brave and clear. The “internal fight” you describe is real, and exhausting. I’m glad you have your boyfriend as an anchor; one steady person can be a lifeline when the world narrows.
    If it helps, a few gentle tools that have helped me and others: name the trigger when you can (“this is a wave”), orient to the room (five things you see/hear/feel), lengthen the exhale, and keep one small plan on the calendar each week so the walls don’t become the world. Take what helps, leave the rest.
    I’m grateful you’re here, and I’m listening.

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