ABSTRACT
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) appeared as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980. With the PTSD diagnosis, psychiatrists now say it is "normal" for the horrors of war to traumatize people; war neurosis, or PTSD, occurs when this trauma is not recognized and is left untreated. Diverse champions of this new diagnosis, among them Vietnam veterans and psychiatrists sympathetic to them, brought it to light as a discovery of what was present but had previously been unseen. Most psychiatrists who served in the Second World War by then had returned to civilian life, and the military again was ill prepared to deal with war neurosis. Early in the Korean War, the military laid plans for a large psychiatric facility in Japan to provide the first line of treatment.
