ealth community and revolutionized the way professionals regard human reactions to trauma. Prior to the disorder's inception, experts attributed the cause of emotional trauma to individual weakness. However, with the advent of the theory of post traumatic stress disorder, experts now attribute the etiology of emotional trauma to an external stressor, not a weakness in the psyche of the individual. Since 1980, the American Psychiatric Association has revised the criteria for diagnosing post traumatic stress disorder several times. Currently, the diagnostic criteria for post traumatic stress disorder include a history of exposure to a traumatic event and symptoms from each of three symptom clusters: intrusive recollections, avoidant/numbing symptoms and hyper arousal symptoms. Recent data indicate that many individuals qualify for a post traumatic stress disorder under the current diagnostic criteria, with prevalence rates running between 5 to 10% in our society.As noted earlier, in order for a diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder to apply, the individual must have been exposed to a traumatic event involving actual or threatened death or injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of the person or others. The authors of the early theory of post traumatic stress disorder considered a traumatic event to be outside the range of human experience, such events included rape, torture, war, the Holocaust, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanos, airplane crashes and automobile accidents, and did not contemplate applying the diagnosis to battered women. The American Psychiatric Association loosened the traumatic event criteria in the DSM-IV, which replaced the DSM-III and DSM-IIIR. Presently, the traumatic event need only be markedly distressing to almost anyone. Therefore, battered women have little trouble meeting the DSM-IV traumatic event diagnostic requirement because most people would find th...
