Hard-working immigrants have been championed for helping Canada become what it is today.  Whether it was the Chinese immigrants who came to work on the railroads in the 1880s or whether it was the waves of immigrants that followed every decade after World War 2, fleeing dictatorships, communism, and other hardships, the common thread that has emerged between all of these immigrants has been a non-stop work grind that has been attributed to the pursuit of a better life.  But what if what has been thought of as a badge of merit was instead a badge of necessity, and what if what has been looked at as a non-stop work grind and the pursuit of a better life was instead a coping mechanism?  Because overworking oneself has been designated as one symptom of PTSD, where individuals avoid their unresolved feelings through overwork, letting their work consume them and keeping their mind away from their troubles.

There is no romanticizing the debilitating condition of PTSD.  It often becomes chronic and disabling and negatively affects a person’s quality of life, but the weird pathophysiology of PTSD makes it so that the symptoms can look different for different individuals.  What may be even weirder is that, across the illness spectrum, every condition has a small percentage of sufferers that exhibit symptoms yet qualify as being “high functioning”, a term used to describe a person’s ability to function despite the illness that may be plaguing them.  But a person being able to overwork themself might not have anything to do with being a high-functioning person struggling with PTSD, and being able to occupy oneself with non-stop work might not be some sort of miracle drug.  So, despite that many epidemiological studies related to PTSD seem to suggest that only a small portion of “susceptible” individuals develop PTSD, depending on biopsychosocial factors, these studies have been incapable of considering the complexities of the newcomers that flee chaos and it has been difficult to tangibly define a PTSD spectrum.

Perhaps there is a far greater number of PTSD suffers in Canada than we have ever realized, especially among all those waves of immigrants that fled chaos and who were almost immediately provided with the opportunity to work and better their lives.  If we go by what countless Canadian war veterans have said about experiencing the war and other forms of chaos while serving abroad, everybody leaves behind a piece of themselves, but some cope or mask it better than others.  Based on what these war veterans have said, it can be assumed that almost every immigrant that flees chaos and uncertainty is likely to suffer from PTSD to some degree.  Then combine that with how trauma is intergenerational and can be passed down and inherited by the children of survivors even if they have no lived connection to the chaos and uncertainty of the old country.  The dynamic nature of all these complexities and all their intersections, like epigenetics, makes this a topic that future researchers are bound to struggle with, because it lacks the tangibility that researchers require to put forward their hypotheses and to investigate them.

One of the world’s leading experts on trauma and addiction is Canadian physician Dr. Mate Gabor, and one of the ways that he has explained the idea of trauma being something that represents the loss of some essential part of a person, like a sense of peace, vitality, or presence, despite that it tends to be the result of outwardly experiences a person may have with the outside world, directly or indirectly.  In his book, In The Real of Hungry Ghost: Close Encounters With Addiction, Dr.  Gabor talks about his own experience being born during Nazi Germany, a Jewish baby whose mother had to abandon him to ensure that the Nazis would not kill him even if they killed his family, and the impact this had on his overall development.  One of the things that Dr.  Gabor talks about is how one of the coping methods that he had resorted to, unbeknownst to him at the time, was overworking himself to the point of exhaustion, even isolating himself from his friends and family.  Luckily for Dr. Gabor, this was a positive coping method, if we can call it that, in comparison to how some people might turn to substances or other high-risk behaviors.

Perhaps all it takes is a glance back in time, whether it is the people of post-World War 2 Eastern Europe.  The people of 1960s Cuba.  The people of 1960s and 1970s Vietnam and Cambodia and Southeast Asia.  The people of 1970s and 1980s Iran and Iraq and the Middle East.  The people of 1990s and 2000s former Yugoslavia and the Balkans, or the people of many decades past Somalia and Africa.  For all the outwardly and philosophical lines of differences between these waves of migration, and for all the complexities and dimensions between people and the conditions to which they were exposed, the world’s people are not so different after all.  Perhaps the hidden realization in all of this is that people sometimes see what they want to see and not always reality, and the only “difference” may lay in the realization that the hard-working tendencies that have been attributed as badges of merit to immigrants may in fact have been badges of necessity.