When therapy does more harm than good

In the churchyard by the church near my grandmother’s house, there’s a tombstone with an inscription that’s haunted me since I was a child. It marks the grave of a woman called Elizabeth who died, as I remember, in the 1920s. Elizabeth married young, had five babies in five years, then died well before she reached 30. The epitaph on her stone: ‘She did her duty.’

I often find myself thinking about Elizabeth and how different her cold and stoic age was to ours. I thought of her late last year as a slew of research revealed that an astonishing number of women, more than one in ten, screen positive for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). We associate PTSD with soldiers back from some grisly frontline but as it turns out, twice as many women as men display symptoms: flashbacks, disassociation, unmanageable anxiety. This isn’t self-indulgent self-diagnosis; it’s real suffering.

Women can be shell-shocked by life. It’s surprising — and it’s not. Consider Elizabeth. All sorts of recent studies show that giving birth, even to a healthy baby, can be traumatising. Most new mothers wobble like light aircraft in turbulence, then stabilise and carry on. A number nosedive. More than 8 per cent of mothers in America and in Canada develop PTSD after childbirth. Then on top of the ordinary grind there’s life’s sucker punches: losing a child; losing a spouse; miscarriage; abortion (much though we celebrate it); serious accidents; sexual abuse.

These things happen to men too — but they happen more often to women and it’s a fact that, for the most part, men and women react differently to traumatic events. A prison chaplain once told me that when male convicts are stressed they become aggressive. They lash out and feel better. Women hurt themselves.