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The Telling History of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
How Vietnam Veterans Shaped the PTSD Diagnosis and How It Changed the Treatment of Trauma for Everyone
The Buffalo Creek Disaster
At 7:59 on a Tuesday morning, a thirty-foot-high wall of black sludge broke through one, then two, then three dams on the Buffalo Creek coal mine and wiped out everything in its path.
The date was February 26th, 1972. The place was Logan County, West Virginia. That’s when and where our modern understanding of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was formed.
[NOTE: This is Part 2 of a series entitled “How the VA Accidentally Started a Psychedelic Revolution (and What It Means for Your Mental Health)”. Click here to read Part 1 entitled “The VA Protest Suicides”. Follow me on Medium or Subscribe to get notified when Part 3 is released.]
132 million gallons of wastewater swept through sixteen downstream towns — Saunders and Pardee, Lorado and Craneco, Lundale and Stowe, Becco and Fanco, just to name a few — and killed 125 out of the 5,000 men, women and children who lived and…
