PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-empire America is a historical and cultural study of war-trauma diagnoses dating from Shell Shock in WWI, through its reformulation as PTSD in the post-Vietnam War years, and then to its enhancement with traumatic brain injury in the twenty-first century. In the context of American defeats in war, PTSD has morphed from a socially-constructed diagnostic category into a political and cultural trope with implications for American masculinity and national identity.
