2016 and more thoughts

It's now February, 2016, and looking back into the past year or so, I'm struck by the very many challenges and changes this past year brought. My husband and I were talking a bit about this yesterday, and we both agreed that it was a 'crappy' year, in general. I don't tend to think of a temporal span of time as being 'crappy', or 'great', I guess. A year is a year, it's 12 months, and what happens INSIDE that year might well be pretty fiercely crappy, at times, for sure, but the year itself isn't anything. Where is PTSD in this past year, for me? For others? For society in general? This is an enormous question! I can state right now that I've noted a MUCH greater 'presence' within societal discourse of the language surrounding PTSD. IN the mainstream media, for example, there appears to be more frequent references to trauma, and particularly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder/Syndrome. It's unfortunate (to say the least) that the context of such references is most often that of gun violence, murder/suicides, and curiousity (only) around the behaviors of men and women returning from combat situations (while not referencing trauma arising from other realities - domestic violence, Post-Partum Depression, exposure to violence in neighborhoods, bullying (both among children and among adults), and violent crimes such as rape and assault, and natural catastrophes). I mention 'unfortunate' here NOT to minimize the traumatic experiences and the PTSD among military veterans, but only to highlight that there are many thousands of people who suffer from PTSD, without coming from military theaters. So, the more frequent mention of PTSD is, overall, still, a good thing, in my view. The more often the societal discourse 'registers' the existence of PTSD, the more thoroughly society in general is exposed to its reality.