On Violence

[Rev. Rye]

There's also another aspect of violence you haven't touched upon in this thread, that of violence inflicted by the world, or circumstances, that catches us up all the same. We think of PTSD as "oh, that's something soldiers come back with", but I'd be willing to bet that by far the large majority of PTSD cases (diagnosed or not) come from people simply seeing things we aren't built for, like seeing someone turned inside-out in a car-crash, or a hand poking out of the rubble of an earthquake.

I can remember reading once about some psychologist who worked with combat veterans with two diagnoses: PTSD and Autism spectrum disorder. You’d think that their PTSD was related to their combat experience. It wasn’t. Their experiences in childhood, especially with schoolmates who spoke friendly with them one minute and stabbed them in the back the next. They managed to come into the service already with PTSD. I remember one saying that at least they knew who was on their side in the war. 

I don’t remember who this psychologist was, but as an autistic person with a lot of trauma in his life, I have zero trouble seeing this as plausible.