Deconstructing PTSD / Destigmatizing Trauma

April 4, 2022 -
5:00pm to 6:30pm

Abdel Hamid Afana, PhD
Research Fellow, Trauma and Global Health Program, McGill University
President of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims
Director of Training and Research Department at the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme

Abstract: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a construct used to describe aspects of some individuals’ suffering after a traumatic event. Yet responses to traumatic experiences can be manifested differently and at different social and psychological levels, and do not necessarily lead to psychopathology. The current conceptualization of PTSD contributes to medicalizing and pathologizing people’s reactions to trauma by focusing on the narrow psychiatric processes. It risks diverting attention from the socio-cultural and political contexts of trauma by individualizing people’s sufferings. Moreover, PTSD is a diagnosis developed in and by the West that often obscures the suffering of civilian populations in non-Western sites. This presentation will focus on trauma, consider the challenges of understanding culturally specific expressions of distress, and examine the conceptual and cultural validity of the diagnostic concept of PTSD as applied to traumatized people in the Arab region.

This Health Humanities Lecture is presented in conjunction with the Center’s virtual art exhibition—Experience, Integration, Expression: The Work of Norman Klenicki.

View online here.

Sponsored by the Center for Bioethics & Health Law

Location and Address

Online