Notes:

Another good thing about psychiatry is that for many disorders, the symptoms only represent the end of a spectrum of reactions that are normal and almost universal. That means that you help students understand what’s going on by asking them to think about their reactions to their own traumatic events.

Most people by the time they get to your ages, have accumulated at least one significant trauma in their lives. I guess death of a parent is the most common, but some of you would have had serious car accidents, or been assaulted or some such thing.

You might want to think about your reactions to those events, while I describe the textbook psychological reactions to trauma to try to get a better understanding of the thing. Nothing like understanding something from the inside.