Sure, but PTSD is a specific disorder that individuals are diagnosed with. If a group of people are unable to work towards a single goal, saying they have “collective ADHD” is imprecise and potentially offensive to people with the diagnosis.
That said, I knew what you meant 🤷
I think there’s a couple of people around with collective OCD that just can’t stand metaphor.
Jokes aside, and not being a sociologist, I do think it’s a good distinction because PTSD implies a maladaptive reaction to trauma, and communities, just like individuals, can process their trauma well or they can mess it up.
It seems to be the accepted term in the scholarly and clinical community.
“Collective trauma” or “collective PTSD”? The latter is what we were discussing earlier in this thread. It has zero occurrences on Google Ngrams: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Collective+PTSD%2C+collective+trauma&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
I was talking about collective trauma which OP was citing, though their initial term is collective PTSD.
Why would you use n-gram and not journal search engine like Google Scholar. There seems to be an engagement in the concept of collective PTSD since about 2007.
Is this an area of research or practice for you? It is not mine.
Trauma and ptsd can be used interchangeably. PTSD is more precise term and clinically significant. Trauma is more colloquial. I used PTSD on purpose to accent the debilitating effect it has on the society as a whole.
