Ji-woo Tanaka

About

The myth I would most like to retire is that this is something only people who have been to war carry. That belief keeps an enormous number of people from ever seeking help, because their experience did not look dramatic enough to qualify in their own estimation. It does not have to look dramatic. PTSD develops from a wide range of circumstances, including ones that were prolonged and ordinary rather than sudden and catastrophic. The criteria are a lot broader than public understanding suggests. We start by taking your experience seriously as it actually was, without any comparison to a more obviously terrible version of it. Community mental health is where I learned the trade, where I met a great many people who had been quietly carrying something for twenty years while assuming it did not count. Almost all of them were wrong about that. If you have decided you do not qualify, come and let us check.