User:KDS4444/PTSD - Early history

PTSD as a formal diagnosis was the eventual outcome of the work of a group of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals working with veterans of the Vietnam War in the mid 1970s. The Vietnam Veterans Working Group, originally consisting of Drs. Robert Lifton, Leonard Neff, Shaim Shatan, and Sarah Haley, was formed in Anaheim in under the guidance of Dr. Robert Spitzer. All of these professionals had come to the conclusion that these war veterans were experiencing a unique and until-then unclassified type of mental illness that was not covered in the existing (i.e., second) version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM-II. In fact, the editors of the DSM-II, which had been published in 1968, did not include any combat-related mental illness diagnoses— the only such illness which had been included in the previous version, the DSM-I, had been "gross stress reaction", and it had been dropped from the DSM-II altogether, a decision for which its editors were eventually criticized and which, like the decision of these same editors to include "homosexuality" for the first time as a mental illness, was eventually recanted and reversed.