So what is actually going on here? American writer Ethan Watters’s recent book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the Western Psyche, offers a highly subversive answer. It is that American society has been permeated by psychoanalytical beliefs about the fragility of the human mind.
This creates an expectation, he argues, that people who have been through horrible experiences will be traumatized. The veterans are simply falling in with that expectation, and exhibiting the symptoms that the theory says they should be showing.
In Britain, where the psychoanalytical approach never got such a hold on popular culture, this expectation is much rarer—and so are the symptoms of PTSD.
Now, I seem to remember some EC comics from the 1950's (you can find reprints of these things if you look) with titles like "Frontline Combat" that had all sorts of stories about GI's going bonkers in combat--mostly they seem to be Korean War stories--that seems to agree with the first paragraph above.
Maybe the saying is right: It's all in your head.
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