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Janet Haaken is both a psychoanalyst and a documentary filmmaker, and, in both roles, her penchant for storytelling is key. As a psychoanalyst she listens to patients as their stories unfold. As a documentarian, she tells the stories of her subjects. As I read her latest book, Psychiatry, Politics, and PTSD: Breaking Down, I found myself associating to Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Like the ancient mariner, who roams from town to town to tell over and over again, the story of the trauma of being trapped on a becalmed sailing ship and watching all of his fellow soldiers perish, Haaken tells the stories of traumatized soldiers and survivors of sexual assault. In the final chapters, she emphasizes the role of storytelling in the healing of trauma, of its basis in relationships. The story must be told, but it also must be heard, and the trauma witnessed for healing to progress.
Haaken’s storytelling skill is in full force in Psychiatry, Politics, and PTSD: Breaking Down, which is a compelling and easy to read discussion of the origin of the PTSD diagnosis, its development over time, and its use both to assist victims of trauma as well as to limit resources and protect society from accepting full responsibility for the trauma its institutions and structures foist upon individuals. To her credit, Haaken does not shy away from the complexity of her topic but faces it head on. She offers an incisive analysis of the PTSD diagnosis, from commentary on the unique position it holds in the DSM as the only diagnosis that requires a specific event that is its cause, to an in-depth look at the way it illuminates a critical conflict in psychiatry, to a comprehensive critique of its use by clinicians. She argues that PTSD is, paradoxically, at once progressive and regressive. Inasmuch as it opens up the possibility that human suffering and even mental illness are sociopolitical problems in which symptoms are expressed by oppressed and exploited individuals, it is