Yes the dolphin thing is silly. As I said, the animal was probably scared more by the fact that shark knives are loud and startling more to an underwater animal than they are peaceful. It's just typical animal trainer nonsense lol. The fact that they interpreted it as trauma is a good tell that they aren't actually scientists, but probably trainers or instructors, who masquerade as scientists pretty often.
Anyway Kyiv's point, and mine in greater verbosity, is that PTSD is hard to distinguish actual PTSD from traumatic events (which is incredibly rare) and fake PTSD from people malingering or seeking social cachet (which is quite common and overrepresented in "veteran" schemata in American culture) which is probably much higher, outside of the relatively small number of people who don't know what PTSD looks like or can't fake a multiple choice test lol. Actual incidences of PTSD of troops in combat is less than 5-8% for males. Women have it at a much higher incidence, nearly triple or quadruple that at between 12-20%, but women are not as good at regulating emotions, in particular negative emotions, as men, so that tracks.
So it's genuinely quite rare. Most people will have a "traumatic" event in their life, and most people won't be affected directly by it in the long term, either. Modern Anglo-American and Western culture at large, however, creates incentives to fake it, because it glamorizes trauma. It's also a lonely culture, which makes it hard to find social needs fulfilled without resorting to drastic measures, which further increases the incentive to malinger.
That's all, it's not a particularly complex idea, just somewhat difficult for me to articulate in particular I guess. Psychiatric disorders are weird because they often tie into compensation for low social status or whatever and this can make the difference between "genuine" and "fake" all by itself. Someone can present fully the clinical symptoms of depression, having literally willed themselves a depressive, by the desire to find friends or by being surrounded by similarly depressed people, out of sheer loneliness. PTSD and depression are often co-morbid in over 90% of cases, and whether that's down to poor diagnostic practices (again, it's usually diagnosed using a self-reporting checklist) or a weak methodological framework is an open question.
If all you have to go on is what someone is willing to tell you and what you're able to find out through interaction with peers, it's not hard for someone to exaggerate symptoms of feigned psychiatric illness into actual illness.
Hence, "schemata transmitted disease" lol.
