© PinterestUniversity of Southern California, Los Angeles
According to Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Mike Lopez, a female faculty member had a "breakdown" in Fertitta Hall and started yelling about an active shooter, which "caused everybody to panic."
Chief John Thomas of USC's Department of Public Safety said it was reported that during class, a faculty member "falsely told her students there was an active shooter in the building."
About 12:15 p.m., officers with the Los Angeles Police Department and USC campus police responded to 610 Childs Way on the University Park Campus and searched the area.
Within the hour, LAPD officials confirmed no shooting took place on the campus.
The university issued a shelter in place order, which was later lifted.
"There's no evidence of a shooting, (but) we did have units that responded to a possible active shooter," said LAPD Detective Meghan Aguilar. "The responding units are trying to touch base with people that called 911 to report it and figure out exactly what's going on there."
The professor was detained and was being questioned to determine her mental health status, Lopez said, and to decide if any charges will be brought.
Fretitta Hall was reopened a short time later, according to USC officials.
Lopez said in light of Sunday night's mass shooting in Las Vegas - the deadliest in modern U.S. history - responding officers couldn't help but fear the worst.
"We're happy it wasn't," he added.
I grant the diagnosis complete validity, but what we've done is lowered the societal bar of what is normally/properly considered to be too much stress.
I won't go into how or why I know more than I care to about PTSD. However, I find it hard to empathize with those who claim 'disabled from work due to PTSD' by letting themselves watch enough stress on TV or the Net, when the PTSD could have been avoided by simply turning off the TV and taking a walk around the neighborhood, or whatever. In the type events where PTSD is legitimately seen to arise, there is almost always 'no way out' of that event, except by one's own death or killing others.
The Snowflakiness-ization of America has provided a generation of "whiners without a cause." Their hysterical and panic related actions show they've never been in an unfairly wrong and potentially severely physically damaging or deadly event, and while that alone can result in PTSD, it is far more likely to occur when the person is one you have been raised to believe you can trust in, so all the folks immorally injured by cops are far more likely to develop PTSD than if the injury was by some never caught mugger. (Psych studies prove this.)
When trusted priests or Country leaders, or cops, turn out to be murderous lying scum, to those whom they swore to 'protect and serve' instead maim, kill, or cause resulting in disabling injuries and a lifetime of pain; well, with every bit of that pain, the wrongful event comes back to them. (I'm referencing a commonality of over five of my clients/patients whatever.)
Of course our other great source of PTSD are our ongoing wars. Also, when one seeks the truth about the facts behind the cause of their war, and realize it was a shoddy scam, also stands disillusioned, as they had a right to reasonably know (and their leaders, a moral obligation reasonably provide them) truth, not propaganda, that too is a similar exacerbating factor.
In war, another type of PTSD disposing factor applies to those who became "too good/successful" at war, killing too many people, and wondering if God's on your side. Having physical injuries exacerbate it. It's simply not part of Man's nature to kill other men. (It takes big training to overcome a lifetime of this innate instinct.) (Note, in WWI, our troops in training shot at classic bullseye targets and failed to have a reasonably sufficient, for the brass, kill ratio per cartridge expended.) Thus, for WWII, the targets were changed to be images of humans and our average soldiers' kill ratios per round went up significantly. That's what training's about.
Likewise, I recall reading somewhere at Verdun, when the idiot general officers kept sending their youth, 'over the top' to where instant slaughter awaited, that some German soldiers were shifted out after an hour at a machine gun, because in that time, they might have killed 500 people and it was time for someone else's turn to deal with all those angry / saddened souls.
A final point, PTSD is particularly individual. Sigfried Sassoon, the most well known poet from WWI, noted in his memoirs that it seemed to him that soldiers who had musical or better hearing/communication skills were far more likely to suffer 'shell shock' from sitting under an artillery barrage that might last for 24 hours, with each round perhaps being the one that will break through your reinforced bunker, resulting in an overload of the nervous system from simply too much noise and stress.
So here's one thing he wrote about his experiences in WWI Finally, if you wish to read excellent combat Memoirs, that will help you better to understand what 'our!' governments still shove kids into, read "With the Old Breed," by E.B. Sledge ; and, (as I've noted before) the excellent book by Henri Barbusse, "La Feu, Under Fire, The Story of a Squad." It's free online at Gutenberg et al. e.g.:
www.gutenberg.org/etext/4380 (copy and paste to address bar.)
R.C.