Episode 22 - Allan Young

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is a disease first diagnosed in Vietnam veterans in 1980. It’s now part of our everyday vocabulary. In this episode, producer David Cayley speaks to Allan Young, Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill. He’s the author of The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The book traces the idea of traumatic memory from the 1860’s, when a British surgeon first described the lingering after-effects of railway accidents, to our own time when the National Institute of Mental Health in the U.S. estimates that every year 7.7 million Americans suffer from PTSD. More than that, Dr. Young’s work examines how a scientific object, like a psychiatric diagnosis, comes into existence, and how it then feeds back into the experience of those who have the diagnosis. Allan Young talks about his research, and about his intellectual journey.