Post-traumatic Stress Disorder – Seeking a Biological Anchor

Medical treatment enjoys revolutionary progress with the advent of molecular biology and tissue/cell- targeted therapies. Psychiatric treatment, for which there is no target tissue, lags behind. In this lecture I will present the sequence of describing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and exploring its putative biology in our laboratory, and others, to illustrate some of the difficulties of going backward from Bedside to Bench in psychiatry. Specifically, the phenotype's complexity and instability have defied, so far, any simplistic biological model. Models of higher complexity have not been clearly formulated. Psychiatric nomenclature and classification must be challenged as well.