or any other mental illness that might provide diagnostic criteria and a label
PTE was proposed by a Berlin psychologist Michel Linden who recognized a discernible repeating pattern in East Germans following the fall of the east German government.
He has had several doctoral students who worked on creating repeatable diagnoses and evaluating treatment for it. The APA has rejected this disorder from inclusion in the DSM.
PTE is suggested as an unusually strong reaction to setbacks that normally occur in life...which are followed by a sense of unfairness, embitterment, and the key diagnostic feature of ideation about revenge.
Post WWII American society didn't have long lasting reversals of fortune that influenced large numbers of people who then started showing up in clinics seeking help. The collapse of east Germany did. The socialization that guided people's lives and pursuit of success became largely useless in a society with both a failed government and a collapsed economy. People suffered as a consequence. But guns weren't widely available in the failed state.
In some ways what Linden proposed is an extreme adjustment disorder. American psychologists have never thought much of adjustment disorders. Relegating them to something of a subclinical complication in the US and clinicians are directed to deal with other mental disorders first if adjustment presented with other illness.
Post-Traumatic Embitterment has no history here, so people have doubt about whether it's real. The public rather strongly objects to the pathologizing of emotions that are common (mostly because the public doesn't want to be labelled with a mental illness). Psychologists working in 'real trauma' didn't like the name Post-traumatic as it over-lapped with PTSD which was already under pressure to disintegrate into several subtypes.
It's important to realize that the APA hasn't got all the answers in the DSM, and for various reasons it doesn't incorporate every mental illness that's recognized elsewhere or proposed. Another example of a disorder that might be of interest in these cases could be narcissistic disorder...only the exhibitionist form is included in the DSM, but last century's expert on the subject recognized other types which have no exhibitionist traits, including one referred to a 'Closet Narcissism' where the question of proper sense of entitlement is one of the difficulties associated with the narcissists sense of self.
= new reply since forum marked as read
**Misdirected- this was intended for the OP****
