Exposure to trauma. The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM–5; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013) defines a traumatic event as exposure to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence. A traumatic event may be experienced directly such that the individual has exposure or witnesses the trauma. Alternatively, trauma can also be experienced indirectly for example, by learning that a family member was exposed to a traumatic event or, perhaps an exposure to details of trauma. Most relevant to the current study, repeated occupational exposure to distressing events may satisfy the definition of traumatic events (APA, 2013).
As aforementioned, …show more content…
Military personnel and industrial workers were two populations identified in this pivotal literature (Crocq & Crocq, 2000; Page, 1883; Pitman, 2013). For example, Freud’s insight and understanding of trauma developed from case studies of both military and non-military cases (Wilson, 1995). Moreover, many of the civilian traumatic cases came from his accounts of patients responses to industrial accidents such as train collisions, most notably, his investment in other’s early work in neurological afflictions in victims of railway accidents (Cohen & Quinter, 1996; Libbrecht & Quackelbeen, 1995). In the mid 19th century, the term “railway spine” was created to categorize railway workers who expressed symptoms such as avoidance or intense fear of railways in addition to their physical injuries following an train wreck (Cohen & Quintner, 1996; Page, 1883; Pitman, …show more content…
(Micale, 1994). Due to a drastic increase in railway transportation in France, much of Charcot’s cases were employees or passengers who were in train wrecks. Interestingly, Charcot’s writings consist of case histories dealing with adult male patients, most of whom were also soldiers with combat experience. Charcot highlighted the psycho-traumatic pathology of the syndrome, stating that the nervous shock or emotional response would be sufficient to develop traumatic neurosis, without physical damage to the individual. He also included a hereditary component that predisposed individuals to pathology from traumatic stress. Charcot’s work was influential to subsequent medical literature, especially surrounding World War One. He was the first physician to identify the contemporary phenomenon known as “post-traumatic amnesia” or a loss of memory surrounding a traumatic event. (Charcot, 1890 found in