It all started with me trying to help myself but I didn't understand what was wrong with me and why I became more and more a nutcase
Of course I knew what PTSD was, but I developed such strange behaviour, it didn't fit into PTSD
I knew the DSM up side down, it's my own line of work, and I couldn't find it in there
I search the web. We have a kind of VA (USA) for vets. And there it was. On their website. One of the most prominent researchers in this field is van der Kolk, he publishes a lot in medical journals, he worked there.
His research with vets and publications revealed an immense scale of psychopathology in vets, far beyond solely PTSD. It resembled a lot DES-NOS from the ICDH classification; DES-NOS doesn't exist in the DSM.
DES-NOS symptoms together with PTSD explained it all for me. That was exactly what I suffered from.
Nobody ever heard of DES-NOS around me but I have called it that for the last 1,5 years. The combination of the two is frequently called complex PTSD.
I red as much as I could find about this. My therapist called it "yet another label, a waste basket for everything they don't understand". Everything and everybody that didn't fit the profile was put aside until it became that much they couldn't ignore it anymore and decide to give the "trash" a name. Everybody relieved. They did something with it. They named it. Bravo! That's it. And psychiatry has another page in their DSM. Everybody promoted and raise in salary.