Lady Gaga has told how she was raped at the age of 19 by a man 20 years her senior. “I suffer from PTSD,” she said in a Today show interview on the US network NBC. “I’ve never told anyone that before.” On Saturday, on Twitter, Piers Morgan tweeted a CNN piece headlined “Lady Gaga: ‘I have PTSD’” with his response: “No, soldiers returning from battlefields do. Enough of this vain-glorious nonsense.” He followed this with another tweet to his 5.3 million followers – “I come from a big military family. It angers me when celebrities start claiming ‘PTSD’ about everything to promote themselves” – before casting doubt on the experiences of sexual assault described by both Lady Gaga and Madonna. The two performers “have both made ALLEGATIONS of rape many years after the event,” he wrote. “No police complaint, no charges, no court case.”

These comments and their trickle-down effect are dangerous for many reasons, and they need to be addressed not just with dissenting voices, but with facts. Because on the subject of PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – Morgan seems to be bafflingly ignorant.

This is a complex condition, as Lady Gaga has pointed out. (She has agreed to an interview with Morgan to discuss the issue, but has suggested she will pull out and speak to someone else, if he continues to publicly shame her.)

We can infer from Morgan’s comments that he believes PTSD to be specifically – perhaps solely – a condition affecting those in the military. This is not even within whispering distance of fact. “PTSD is a form of mental distress that can affect all sections of society,” says Sue Baker, the director of Time to Change, a UK campaign that aims to end stigma around mental health. “People of all statuses, ages, genders, sexualities, or any other variable, can suffer.”

PTSD was first recognised in first world war soldiers, though often as a mysterious, poorly managed condition referred to as “shell shock”. Many were discharged from the military in severe psychiatric distress. It was only in 1980, after the traumas of the Vietnam war, that the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in the US recognised PTSD as a diagnosable entity, defined by highly distressing symptoms such as intrusive memories, flashbacks, nightmares, persistent fear and dread, anger, guilt, shame, sleeplessness and many physical manifestations of anxiety such as increased heart rate, sweating, dizziness, nausea and diarrhoea.

No, soldiers returning from battlefields do.

Enough of this vain-glorious nonsense. https://t.co/WR2ODolv8v — Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) December 10, 2016

The National Institute of Mental Health, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, states that the trauma that causes the distress is actually not always “dangerous”. For example, some people develop PTSD after someone close experiences harm, or after the death of a loved one. Women sometimes experience it after childbirth. And, in fact, women are more likely to develop PTSD than men. Why? The high incidence of sexual violence.

The World Health Organisation states that the prevalence of sexual violence faced by women and the correspondingly high rate of PTSD renders women the largest single group of people affected by this disorder. In England and Wales one in five women aged 16-59 have experienced some form of sexual violence since the age of 16; and 31% of women aged 18-24 report having experienced sexual abuse in childhood. It is suspected that these figures might be an under-representation due to a lack of reporting fed by our culture of disbelief – a culture Morgan illustrated and fed with his tweets. By extension, many women may not be seeking help for symptoms of PTSD.

The military takes sexual assault very seriously. The US Department of Veteran Affairs says that sexual assault is “more likely to cause PTSD than many other events”. Of course, within the military this is not just a women’s issue. In the US one in four women and one in 100 men who were screened reported experiencing military sexual trauma. Rates are higher among women, but because there are more men than women in the military, though there are significant numbers of victims of both genders.

The intersection of sexual assault and PTSD cannot be refuted by anyone. Striking gender differences are found in the patterns of mental health problems across the world, including, as we know, in the prevalence of PTSD, but no one benefits if sexual trauma is somehow banished from our perceived parameters of “proper” PTSD. It is thought that 12,000 men are raped in England and Wales every year. Painting PTSD as something only military veterans live with is a callous dismissal of the pain many of these men, and by extension their families, are likely to be living with.

We frequently see on social media how celebrity provides a prompt for conversations about sexual assault. Last month the former darts champion Eric Bristow lost his role as a pundit for Sky Sports after firing off a series of offensive tweets on the football child abuse scandal, and while many vilified him, his comments nonetheless amplified the shame and stigma that have so often prevented victims from speaking out.

In the wake of Morgan’s comments about Lady Gaga, it’s easy to feel impotent. What we can do, when we encounter these subjects, is to be committed to challenging both our own and others’ ideas of what mental distress or trauma looks like. Being ill-informed might be provocative, but it is certainly not productive.