The First Ring: What Households Carry

The preceding articles concerned a single person. This one concerns the people who live alongside him. The evidence here is stronger than the evidence for the mechanism, and comes from a different literature entirely.

What the research examines Established

A 2007 study in the Croatian Medical Journal examined 56 wives of war veterans diagnosed with PTSD. Twenty-two met full diagnostic criteria for secondary traumatic stress — more than a third of the sample.

Any treatment offered to the veteran must also address the traumatisation of the family.

What the finding means, and what it does not

These were wives of combat veterans with diagnosed PTSD — not the same population as families living with quinoline injury. This series is not arguing the Croatian findings apply directly. It is observing that where a household lives alongside similar features — the nightmares, the hypervigilance — measurable effects on family members have been documented elsewhere. That is an inference by analogy, offered as one.

The consistency of the boundary

A 2017 systematic review screened more than 3,000 records and included 48 studies. Every one was confined to the household. That boundary is not a finding about where effects stop — it is a description of where research has looked.

The question this raises Unstudied

A spouse shares a home. A child shares a home. A neighbour shares a wall. A teacher sees a child several hours a day, for years. These are lesser degrees of proximity than a marriage. They are not zero.

The literature that documents household effects stops, consistently and by design, at the household door. What lies past it is not a finding. It is an absence of looking.