Combat Stress and PTSD | Matt Zefferman | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #32

Why does severe trauma lead to PTSD? This episode considers work on combat stress and PTSD symptoms in Turkana warriors of North West Kenya, and how it relates to evolutionary explanations of PTSD symptoms.

Matt Zefferman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

He uses mathematical models and ethnographic field research to understand human culture, cooperation, and conflict – especially in the contexts of political organization and war.

He has also conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Turkana pastoralist warriors in northwest Kenya. They have a high degree of combat exposure – with about half of adult male mortality due to combat in cattle raids. Matt is interested in how Turkana organization for war has influenced their susceptibility to combat stress and moral injury. He has interviewed hundreds of warriors about their combat experiences, moral beliefs about warfare, combat stress symptoms, and moral injury.

Before starting as an assistant professor at NPS Matt was a Donald R. Beall Defense Fellow in his department. Before that he was a postdoctoral research fellow at ASU’s Institute of Human Origins and a member of  the Adaptation, Behavior, Culture and Society research group in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.  Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis and, before that, earned his PhD at the University of California, Davis in the Cultural Evolution and Human Behavioral Ecology Labs.

Matt is also a US Air Force veteran with six years of service as a civil engineering officer with deployments to the UAE and Afghanistan.