Usefulness and validity of post-traumatic stress disorder as a psychiatric category.

Post-traumatic stress disorder has attracted controversy and scepticism since its first appearance in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1980s. Over the years the diagnostic criteria have been refined and revised, but the causal relation between the diagnosis and an external trauma has remained fundamentally unchanged. Post-traumatic stress disorder is associated with clinically important distress that transcends ordinary misery and unhappiness as well as with disruption and impairment of daily functioning. We argue that the diagnosis is valid and important for both patients and doctors.