PTSD or PTS?

Our sister site Fearless Nation PTSD Support calls PTSD a normal reaction to abnormal events. The military agrees and is pushing to have PTSD reclassified as simply PTS -- post-traumatic stress, no "disorder." In fact, more often than not, they are already dropping the D.

Time's Battleland blog looks into the issue:

Military mental-health workers constantly try to reduce the stigma associated with mental-health ills, and one way to do that is to not term the problem a disorder.


Some veterans agree, but others -- fearful the name change is simply a way of minimizing what they're going through -- don't. "It's a double-edged sword," a long-time Army psychiatrist says privately. "We're trying to reduce the stigma associated with the condition, but it's in the DSM-4 [the American Psychiatric Associati0n's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), the accepted roster of various mental conditions] as PTSD. And some veterans fear that deleting disorder will jeopardize the VA benefits they get for it."

So what do you think? Does the word Disorder matter? Does it have meaning? Does it add stigma? Is it truthful or in the way? We'd love to hear your comments.