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Post-Traumatic Stress Essay The Post-traumatic stress disorder is a mental illness that maydevelop in people after a horrible experience. This is a big reaction to extremestress. There are many causes, symptoms, and treatments for the post-traumaticstress disorder. There are many causes this disorder has, and this includes:coming out of war, being raped, or attacked, child abuse, natural disasters, caraccidents, and even people who witness traumatic events could develop thisdisorder. A person who has experienced a bad traumatic event has a better chanceof developing this disorder than a person who experienced a less traumatic eventdevelops. This works the same way with people who witness something horrible. There are several themes in Possession that tie this book to earlier texts that we have read. Individual versus group identity, feminism, sexuality and the link between present and past are themes that Byatt deals with in her novel. Interestingly, Byatt expresses many of these themes using symbolic color imagery, a technique that makes her writing reminiscent of Pre-Raphaelite style. According to Byatt, the struggle of the individual to discover and then live out her own identity, an identity etched out only with enormous effort and determination is a major theme running through many of her novels, especially this one. The title itself brings out the first questions of identity-Possession. Who possesses whom? Does he possess her, or does she possess him? Are they owning and possessing their literary history, or does it possess them? Individual identity is lost in the way the book is written. Many times, the reader cannot tell one couple from the other-who is reading Ashs poetry, kiss ing, running away on a honeymoon of sorts, and making love? Is it Roland and Maud, or is she suddenly writing about Christabel and Ash again? Throughout the book, Byatt often makes these switches in characters between scenes without telling the reader. The effect is that the narrative is essentially no different for each couple living in different time periods. The same love story that defines Christabel and Ash in the 1860s also describes Roland and Maud in the 1980s. In Victorian tradition, it was the man who owned the woman, his wife. Yet in this modern Victorian work, that becomes twisted. When Ash attempts to claim Christabel on page 308 by holding her and making love to her, the act of possession is switched around. He is trying figuratively to grasp her, and she was liquid moving through his grasping fingers, as though she was waves of the sea rising all round him. He tries to take her all in, to know her, and her womanhood eludes him, as personality always will. Byatts messa ge seems to be that a personality cannot be taken or possessed by someone else, that individuality always remains, even in Victorian situations of female oppression and domination by males. This interwovenness and connection between the two couples through themes and situations, serves also to connect the past to the present, the Victorian to the Post-modern. Gilded Age Essay The poverty that Native Americans and those of other similar demographics lived in caused a sharp difference in veterans who suffered from PTSD, as Sarah L. Knox writes in a review of Eric T. Dean, Jr.s Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (111). Knox says Dean argues that the privileged veteran would receive better treatment and medical attention compared to his impoverished counterpart (111). Neal also states that the communities and employers of Vietnam veterans treated them as if they had just gotten back from a vacation (140). This casual handling .