Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival

by Joe Simpson

I had always been a little sceptical about the very idea of post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems that everyone gets it nowadays and I was suspicious that it had become a catchall to provide exculpation from the past and a convenient way of suing for compensation. Why were not millions of people paralysed by post-traumatic stress disorders after the first and second world wars, both soldiers and civilians alike who bore witness to the most appalling experiences imaginable on a scale never before encountered? Certainly by the Second World War 'shell-shock' had been recognised as something other than 'lacking moral fibre'. Perhaps the difference then was that people did not live in the ghastly blame and compensation culture that we do today. So it came as some surprise to be told on my return from Peru that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.