PTSD is something that you usually hear about when someone goes through a traumatic experience or a solider coming home from war. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is a mental health condition that can be triggered by hearing or seeing an event occur. Sometimes an event can trigger a flashback and make someone with PTSD feel like they’re experiencing that traumatic event all over again. In the case of Brannan Vine, she doesn’t flashback to a traumatic event because she never went through one, but her husband did.

Brannan Vine’s husband, Caleb Vine, was sent away twice to fight in Iraq and came back to the states with PTSD. Since Caleb’s return home in 2006 it is believed that Brannan has caught his symptoms. Her symptoms are so extreme that she says it’s hard to do laundry sometimes. She can’t do it because it’s too much for her brain to handle sometimes. It’s bad enough that she has to help take care of her husband but now she is becoming the one who needs taking care of as well.

The idea of PTSD being contagious might not be as far fetched as it sounds. Doctors are perplexed as to why Caleb suffers like he does. They don’t understand why all the things he’s been through caused him to get PTSD but not the other soldiers he was with. Some hypotheses for this say that maybe it’s because of unhappily coded proteins, misbehaving amygdala or even family history. If family history is a factor in who gets PTSD and who doesn’t obviously it’s possible for PTSD to in fact be contagious/genetic even.

The reason Brannan Vine could have caught PTSD might be the fact that she’s under a lot of pressure. She not only has to take care of her husband but she has a young daughter who needs to be taken care of as well. All the things she has to worry about on a daily basis might be her traumatic event and could’ve caused her to get PTSD instead of catch it from her husband. Or after dealing with it for so long it could have just rubbed off onto her.