In Haiti in 2010, Mac McClelland, an award-winning reporter for Mother Jones magazine, witnessed something unbearable. She doesn’t give details in her book, but elsewhere she has explained that she was in a car with a Haitian woman who had been gang-raped and appallingly maimed by five men. On the way back from the hospital where her injuries had been treated, the woman saw one of her attackers in the street. She screamed in terror, and then, as McClelland describes it, “I lost myself in place and time and in my body.”

It was over in moments, but this glimpse of someone else’s pain, compounded by other dangers and perhaps long-buried memories, was enough to set McClelland on a path of unmooring mental and physical illness and a healing process that took years which she describes in her new book Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story.



But her experience was also, in the eyes of the world and often of McClelland herself, not enough to warrant the label of “trauma” or a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Among veterans, PTSD is often triggered by witnessing terrible events, or what the war poet Wilfred Owen called “helpless sight”. But although we are getting better at diagnosing the condition, we still aren’t good at treating it, preventing it or admitting to it in the first place.



“I talked to a lot of people who had PTSD and they all have similar experiences,” says McClelland. “They feel like they didn’t deserve to be traumatised, and they feel like other people don’t feel like they deserve to be traumatised.”

As part of her research into the way PTSD affects intimate relationships, McClelland spent time in Alabama with Brannan Vines, who started the support group Family of a Vet after her husband returned from Iraq physically injured and psychologically broken. The suffering of veterans’ wives and children has begun to be named as secondary traumatic stress disorder – yet for Vines and for women like her, it is almost impossible to admit to. How could the pain of life at home, even with an erratic and violent spouse, compare to life in a combat zone?

Except that for millions of women and children, home is a combat zone. The most common cause of PTSD in America, McClelland explains in her book, is not war but sexual assault and domestic abuse – violence against women. She says her discovery of those high rates of female trauma “lit a fire” under her project. “This is insane, that we can only conceive of PTSD in terms of combat, when that’s not even where most of it comes from in our own country.”

But first she needed to heal herself. Treatment of PTSD usually involves some combination of medication and talk therapy, but – living in San Francisco where the method is common – McClelland lucked into somatic therapy, a method that begins from the recognition that PTSD is a bodily disorder, and treats it there. She has become an earnest advocate for this approach, despite her initial scepticism. “[The therapist is] having me like lay down on a table and feel into spaces where sadness lives, and at first I was like, oh my God. I’m from Ohio,” she says.

But the treatment allowed her to make connections she doesn’t think she would have made if she were trying to put her feelings into words that made sense. Sitting in a sushi restaurant with her partner, McClelland was suddenly overwhelmed by panic. It wasn’t until a later therapy session that she was able to work out why.

“I thought that this sushi chef was going to see us together and he’d be like, ‘Oh, that girl’s straight and in love and depends on this man, therefore she’s weak and would be easy to kill.’” The reaction was rooted in her wire-crossed nervous system. “If I had just been trying to talk about it, I would never have come up with that story, ever, because it’s crazy.”

McClelland’s battle with PTSD runs parallel to her deepening relationship with Nico, a Frenchman stationed in Port-au-Prince whom she met on her first night there in the hotel pool, and who is now her husband. The two spoke barely a handful of words in each other’s languages, which may have meant that McClelland couldn’t explain away her symptoms. “I had to choose my words very carefully with him: every single one was an effort,” she says. “I said 3% as much stuff as I would have in a conversation with someone who could understand me.”

She’s not sure if that was helpful – “it was a nightmare” – and she credits Nico with extraordinary intuition and patience. But it did mean that she couldn’t hedge. “The way people describe their feelings has a lot of disclaimers and a lot of context and references to things outside themselves,” she says, but with Nico she had to be direct, she couldn’t play things down.

“We feel we have this duty to discount our own experience – this thing happened to me, but this other thing which is obviously worse happened to you. What are these qualifications? What is this scale that we’re using?” She is convinced that these habits of comparison and denial are dangerous: “It makes it harder for people to accept what they are going through when they have to keep denigrating it and invalidating it.”

When McClelland first wrote an essay in 2011 about her trauma in Haiti, and her subsequent desire for violent sex, she received a flood of both support and vitriol. This time around, she is sanguine about those reactions. “When you talk about trauma, people react very strongly to it, and when you just talk about sex by itself, people react very strongly to that,” she says. “So when you’re talking about sex and trauma and rape culture and privilege and healing, all these things at the same time, there’s a thousand ways to upset anyone.”

She is not optimistic that her book will change her detractors’ minds, but she does hope she will make it possible for other sufferers, especially women, to speak, and to help dismantle the hierarchy that keeps victims quiet. We may not know exactly how to help PTSD sufferers heal, but we do know that it’s our duty to listen, whoever they are.