Clinician's Guide to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
"Contributors to this impressive collection include Robert Spitzer, one of the architects of DSM-III, and Jerome C. Wakefield and Allan V. Horwitz, authors ofThe Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder(Oxford University Press, 2007).... It is ironic that research spurred by the introduction of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has come to challenge almost every aspect of the construct's originating assumptions. These issues are carefully discussed: the idea of a specific aetiology; the distinctiveness of the supposed core symptoms; the loosening of the stressor criterion, which editor Gerald Rosen calls 'criterion creep'.... Without a coherent position on the question of specific aetiology, the validity of PTSD rests largely on the distinctiveness of its clinical syndrome, yet its features overlap substantially with other psychiatric categories.... This book interrogates the construction of PTSD and can serve as a case example of the way to critique the construction of psychiatric knowledge across the whole field." (Derek Summerfield,The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2011, 199:347)