The clinical framing of psychic trauma as PTSD has reshaped American foreign policy discourse over the past fifty years, with important temporal and ethical consequences.

🧭 Research Design: Historical Records and Five Decades of Policy Speech

• Mixed-methods approach combining historical analysis of PTSD's clinical development with quantitative and qualitative analysis of policy texts.
• Sources include presidential papers, presidential debates, and the Congressional Record covering the last fifty years.
• Notes the diagnostic milestone that PTSD was added to the DSM in 1980.

🔎 Key Finding 1: When PTSD Entered Political Conversation

• Although PTSD became a formal diagnosis in 1980, American political leaders only began commonly referencing the disorder around the 2008 presidential cycle—more than half a decade into the War on Terror.

⚖️ Key Finding 2: PTSD's Effect on the Conceptual Boundaries of War

• Critical discourse analysis shows increased attention to PTSD has blurred spatiotemporal lines around the concept of war.
• That blurring extends war’s consequences into an uncertain future and beyond the physical war zone.
• The erosion also undermines the ethical distinction between victim and perpetrator, producing significant normative consequences for policy and public debate.

🌍 Why It Matters: Policy and Conceptual Implications

• These findings document an evolution in American foreign policy discourse and highlight broader conceptual challenges posed by war trauma, especially concerning how suffering, responsibility, and moral categories are framed in post-conflict politics.