Rachel Nelson

About

Is what happened to me bad enough to count? That question arrives more than any other, usually from someone who has spent years quietly deciding that it was not. The question itself is often the clearest indicator. PTSD is diagnosed on the basis of how something continues to affect you rather than on a ranking of how terrible the original event was. Comparison to worse experiences is not a diagnostic method. We look at what is actually happening in your week now, which tells us far more than an assessment of whether your history was sufficiently severe. A decade in hospital and intensive outpatient settings put me alongside people whose histories varied enormously and whose difficulties looked very similar. Severity is a poor predictor of impact. If you have been ruling yourself out, come and let someone else look at it. Nobody here will rank your history against anybody else's.