PTSD Screening: Yet Another Scam from the Hoaxucopia?
This article is the first in a three part series looking at Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Is PTSD a real illness or a ruse to sell more drugs?
War upsets people. War is bad for people, whether or not you think this war or that is justified or necessary it is a thoroughly unpleasant, horrifying, disturbing experience,
Anyone then who becomes disturbed or upset by the inhuman experience of being on the front lines or in a war zone is experiencing normal emotions. To find war thoroughly unpleasant and frightening is a SANE reaction to it. Indeed, anyone who considers or propagandizes war as a jolly fine way (usually for other people) to pass the time and resolve problems of human interrelations, or who finds the experience fun, is most certainly one space bar short of full keyboard
This has been so since the very first psycho convinced his saner fellows that it would be a spiffing idea to visit the neighboring tribe and chop them up a bit (or a lot).
And down through all those dark, unpleasant ages the vast majority of men have yet survived those experiences with their equilibrium momentarily disturbed but their sanity in the long tem intact. The miracle is that while war might temporarily terrify those actually in it to the point of incontinence, very few human beings are driven permanently insane by it and the majority hold onto their sanity and decency.
The detractors and defamers of Man and those with a vested interest in convincing man of his own rottenness to the contrary, to get most people into a frame of mind where they will entertain blowing up the children of people they have never met, napalming supermarkets or machine gunning perfect strangers for wearing turbans or the wrong aftershave, it is usually necessary to work very hard for a protracted period of time. It requires a dedicated program of scaring the bejeezus out of people, disabusing them of their natural kinship with their fellows and convincing them that the other chap is somehow less than human and thus less worthy of the right to breathe - in other words getting everybody thoroughly upset.
Man will not kill man usually unless you thoroughly upset him first. War is NOT a natural condition of Man, as evinced by the fact that at any one moment ninety none percent of human beings are NOT shooting at one another or dropping bombs on cities they have not even heard of. In fact in the course of an ordinary day such notions rarely enter one’s head - unless planted there by that primary tool for upsetting people, the media, of course.
War is unnatural and the product of insanity. It is the resort of lunatics who must drive their fellows mad in order to persuade them to play the game called war. No wonder people who find themselves induced into it find it disturbing.
What is even more disturbing is how psychiatry and its co-conspirator, the drug manufacturers, have cashed in on this normal human reaction to being placed in a very disturbing environment by labeling it a "mental illness", giving it a fancy, scientific-sounding, name and voting it for inclusion in their "billing bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
And when I say voting, I mean voting. Ah, you thought there was actually some science behind psychiatry’s ever-increasing list of mental "disorders," didn’t you? Well I am sorry to have to tell you that charlatanry, not science, rules the roost in our modern mental health system but it does. It is a matter of disgraceful fact that it is a VOTE that gets any newly dreamed up "mental illness" into the psychiatric manual, NOT science.
So it was with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Voted into the diagnostic manual, normal human distress at being placed in an horrific situation became a "mental illness" that had to be "managed" (not cured, you understand because psychiatry has long given up pretending it cures anything)) with drugs and thus the psycho-pharmacy, by adding another money-spinner to its hoaxucopia, created a whole new client base at a stroke and opened the door to making millions by billing government and private insurance companies to treat PTSD.
The next trick, which added even more people to the client base, and thus the opportunity to make even more money, was to extend the diagnosing of the new disease beyond pathologizing the problems of people actually in a war, to the reactions of war veterans, then to pathologizing the impact of myriad adverse events on ordinary people. Anywhere where people are having a hard time or are upset or have been through some adverse experience great or small, one now finds the psychiatrists like flies around a honey pot, pens quivering over their prescription pads, eager to diagnose "mental illness" and prescribe some drug whose side effects - if you read the label - testify to their power to do you serious harm.
There was a time when people lived through wars and all manner of horrors, let alone the smaller calamities to which life is prone, but were strong enough to recover and get on with their lives but now, apparently, we are so mentally feeble we stand ready to go insane at the drop of a hat and do not have the resilience to survive life’s knocks without psychiatrists dispensing the happy pills before we have a chance to blink - pills which, purely coincidentally, make an awful lot of dough for the psycho-pharmacy.
Psychiatrists admit they do not know what causes any of the "sicknesses" they invented and vote into the DSM, nor do they know how to cure them, as psychiatrist Norman Sartorius, former president of the World Psychiatric Association, so aptly put it in 1994, "The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness."
Imagine the outcry if the nation’s doctors declared they did not know how to fix broken bones or remove bullets and from now on people would just have to learn to live with it.
