Did Daenerys Targaryen have PTSD?

The penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, “The Bells”, featured a neat victory — thrown completely awry when Queen Daenerys incinerated huge swaths of already-surrendered King’s Landing. This led to heartbreaking choices viewers saw in the finale, when those who loved the queen most had to act in the best interests of those she had not already killed.

Many viewers dismissed the episode as a pretty piece of art with lazy-to-no storytelling. GOT’s audience wanted the kind and just woman from the beginning of the series to conquer and rule as peacefully as possible, though she had been committing acts of increasing violence as a means of self-protection and dominance.

No less than the Washington Post crowed, “…3,500 parents may be having second thoughts after last night’s ‘Game of Thrones’”. The reporter was referring to newborns named Khaleesi, her honorific title, or Daenerys.

But the bizarre reaction she had when she should have been celebrating a victory, the cockamamie emotional processing and the tragic use of her once-cute dragon, seem more plausible in light of the repeated traumas doled out to her by Messrs. Benioff and Weiss. Indeed, Daenerys likely had PTSD, and we can learn quite a bit about PTSD with the show as an illustrative example.

PTSD is a disorder occurring in people who have experienced a traumatic life event. The symptoms include anxiety, difficulty sleeping, hypervigilance, nightmares, and avoidance of situations that remind one of the event, as when veterans avoid crowded…