Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) is pure
"classic" Junk science.
Psychiatry is Junk
science
No scientific data that Psychiatry works!
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Snapshot:
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A. Snapshot summary:
1. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a behaviour choice not a disease.
2. PTSD is historically known as Hysteria. (click to see details)
3. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is adopted as behaviour in order to gain some personal benefit.
a. Some War Veterans realize when they return from duty that all their training as soldiers has ill equipped them for standard workplace skills. When they entered the army, they have almost no work skills that would merit them a good job. When they return, nothing has changed, they still possess almost no work skills to get a good paying job. They claim Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and suddenly get "cash for life" through a disability welfare system and free healthcare.
- "A battalion chief in a large metropolitan fire and rescue agency, writing about the ascendance of the Critical Incident Stress Debriefing movement in his field, noted a comment made decades earlier by a hook and ladder captain: "We used to have steel men and wooden wagons; now we have steel wagons and wooden men" (Response to disaster: psychosocial, community, and ecological approaches By Richard Gist, Bernard Lubin, 1999 AD, p 211)
- With governments passing legislation that forces employers to pay their employees benefits if they claim Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder experienced from their job, it is lucrative for a new crop of entitlement seeking employees. These are the same group of people presidential candidate Mitt Romney identified as the 47% who seek government handouts rather than work hard the pull their own weight in the world.
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, however, is becoming the "disease of choice" among those seeking "cash for life":
- PTSD is claimed when someone personally experiences mugging, rape, torture, being kidnapped or held captive, death of loved one, divorce, financial loss, child abuse, car accidents, train wrecks, plane crashes, bombings, or natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes for rape, physical or sexual abuse as a child, war, serious accidents
- PTSD is vicariously claimed when someone merely witnesses another experiencing a traumatic life event.
- People can simply claim because they can get the same high level of welfare without the negative stigma of being labeled with a mental illness or being viewed as insane.
- Essentially, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is the fastest pipeline for young, normal, healthy people to easily gain the highest paying form of public welfare: Disability welfare and government paid free healthcare for life.
- Fireman, policeman, paramedics, soldiers share the commonality of being public sector employees with lucrative benefits packages that specifically name Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a condition of getting paid big dollars while staying at home and doing whatever they want.
- The unemployed or private sector employees rarely Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder because there is no automatic benefit for them like there is for most public sector employees.
- In other words, those who can gain a benefit from claiming Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder make claims but those who cannot gain any benefit do not.
- The suggestion that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a disease or caused by chemical imbalances in the brain are absurd.
6. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder has a long history with soldiers who made false claims of being sick in order to avoid the draft and those who made false claims of sick after they returned from deployment:
a. "In World War I, soldiers afraid of being killed in battle malingered; psychiatrists who wanted to protect them from being returned to the trenches diagnosed them as having a mental illness (then called "hysteria"). Today, ninety years later, soldiers returning home and afraid of being without "health care coverage" diagnose themselves as having a mental illness (now called "post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]"). The soldiers themselves candidly acknowledge this motive. Almost 50 percent of the troops returning from Iraq suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression "because they want to make sure that they continue to get health care coverage once their deployments have ended."" (Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, Thomas Szasz, 2008 AD, p 24)
b. "Before the war, the standard psychiatric treatment for hysteria was the so-called electric treatment, or "faradism," a procedure consisting of the application of interrupted DC (direct current) stimuli to the patient's supposedly affected muscles and nerves. Its effect, if any, was owing solely to suggestion. In his early years of practice, Freud routinely used this method. Its employment for the treatment of "war hysteria"- in other words, war neurosis, traumatic neurosis, shell shock, today anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder-was an extension of this standard psychiatric therapy to military malingerers treated by doctors pretending to believe that the shirkers were sick." (Psychiatry: The Science of Lies, Thomas Szasz, 2008 AD, p 70)
7. There is an entire industry of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder specialists including doctors, councilors, lawyers, psychologists, psychiatrists and Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) experts who bleed billions of dollars of wasted cash from the insurance companies, governments and corporations:
a. A similar "disaster-myth" entrepreneurial initiative is evident in "critical incident stress debriefing" (CISD), developed by Jeff Mitchell, a former volunteer firefighter and paramedic. He claims that a large proportion of emergency personnel experience some negative reaction to critical incidents. For many, he believes, these signs of stress, if left untreated, would "develop into full-fledged post-traumatic stress disorders." Consequently he designed CISD, a structured group intervention that focused on the identification and ventilation of emotions. The program has become a burgeoning cottage industry of journals, books, workshops and lectures around the world. Workshop registrants become trained CIS debriefers, a specialty used to gain contracts with emergency organizations, school boards, airlines and banks. While CISD flourishes, progressively more critics, concerned about potential harm, are questioning the "scientific evidence." A battalion chief in a large metropolitan fire and rescue agency, writing about the ascendance of the CISD movement in his field. noted a comment made decades earlier by a hook and ladder captain: "We used to have steel men and wooden wagons; now we have steel wagons and wooden men." He is one of an increasing number of people who are expressing concern that such procedures undermine the natural support and adaptation that keeps those with jobs like firefighting resilient. (Manufacturing Victims, Dr. Tana Dineen, 2001, p 184)
8. Treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with drugs is like smashing a computer because of a software virus.
9. Every person on earth has experienced and witnessed many things that are both traumatic and stressful.
10. Jesus commands us to be anxious for nothing and He expects us to bear up when we experience traumatic and stressful situations by placing our faith and trust in Him. Anxiety is a sinful behaviour choice which is "cured" through self-control not drugs.
B. What biopsychiatrists, drug companies and governments say:
Notice they admit PSTD is caused by life experience and not a chemical imbalance in the brain. PTSD is a behaviour choice not a disease:
1. "Recent studies have shown that childhood abuse (particularly sexual abuse) is a strong predictor of the lifetime likelihood of developing PTSD." (What is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, Sidran Foundation, The Sidran Institute, a leader in traumatic stress education and advocacy)
2. "Who Is Most Likely to Develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? People who have been abused as children or who have had other previous traumatic experiences are more likely to develop the disorder. Research is continuing to pinpoint other factors that may lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It used to be believed that people who tend to be emotionally numb after a trauma were showing a healthy response, but now some researchers suspect that people who experience this emotional distancing may be more prone to PTSD." (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Freedom From Fear, Staten Island, NY, National non-profit Mental Illness Advocacy Organization)
3. "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: PTSD can result from personally experienced traumas (e.g., rape, war, natural disasters, abuse, serious accidents, and captivity) or from the witnessing or learning of a violent or tragic event. ... How is PTSD treated? There are a variety of treatments for PTSD, and individuals respond to treatments differently. PTSD often can be treated effectively with psychotherapy or medication or both." (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, NAMI, National Alliance on Mental Illness, Jack Gorman, MD May 2003)
4. "PTSD was first brought to public attention in relation to war veterans, but it can result from a variety of traumatic incidents, such as mugging, rape, torture, being kidnapped or held captive, child abuse, car accidents, train wrecks, plane crashes, bombings, or natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that encodes threatening events into memories. Studies have shown that the hippocampus appears to be smaller in some people who were victims of child abuse or who served in military combat. Research will determine what causes this reduction in size and what role it plays in the flashbacks, deficits in explicit memory, and fragmented memories of the traumatic event that are common in PTSD. By learning more about how the brain creates fear and anxiety, scientists may be able to devise better treatments for anxiety disorders. For example, if specific neurotransmitters are found to play an important role in fear, drugs may be developed that will block them and decrease fear responses; if enough is learned about how the brain generates new cells throughout the lifecycle, it may be possible to stimulate the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus in people with PTSD. By learning more about how the brain creates fear and anxiety, scientists may be able to devise better treatments for anxiety disorders. For example, if specific neurotransmitters are found to play an important role in fear, drugs may be developed that will block them and decrease fear responses; if enough is learned about how the brain generates new cells throughout the lifecycle, it may be possible to stimulate the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus in people with PTSD." (Anxiety Disorders, National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH, 2006)
5. "Treatment of Anxiety Disorders: In general, anxiety disorders are treated with medication, specific types of psychotherapy, or both" (Anxiety Disorders, National Institute of Mental Health, NIMH, 2006)
6. "PTSD: Etiology: The Role of the Stressor: The severity of the stressor in PTSD differs in magnitude from that found in adjustment disorder, which is usually less severe and within the range of common life experience. However, this relationship between the severity of the stressor and the type of subsequent symptomatology is not always predictable. For example, studies of bereavement and divorce have found that stressors within the range of usual human experience can also pro-duce a distinctive syndrome of reexperiencing the trauma (Horowitz et al. 1980). In effect, it has generally been underemphasized that in the average community setting, events such as sudden loss of a spouse are a much more frequent cause of PTSD than are assault and violence (Breslau et al. 1998). Nevertheless, events such as sexual assault or armed robbery, which are interpersonal insults to integrity, self- esteem, and security, are particularly likely to lead to PTSD. When stressors become extreme (e.g., rape, extended combat, torture, concentration camp experiences), the rate of morbidity significantly increases. For example, the ECA study found that in men who had served in Vietnam, 4% of those who were in combat but were not wounded had PTSD, whereas 20% of combat veterans who had been wounded developed PTSD. In even more horrendous conditions, such as those endured by U.S. prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War II, extremely high PTSD incidence rates have been reported: 84% lifetime and 59% decades after (Engdahl et al. 1997). Variable PTSD rates have been found in individuals subjected to major noninterpersonal trauma; for example, reported rates in severely injured accident victims range from a very low 2% (Schnyder et al. 2001) to 32% (Koren et al. 1999). In those sustaining severe traumatic brain injury, a 27% PTSD incidence has been reported (Bryant et al. 2000a). Childhood interpersonal trauma can often result in PTSD, as is widely known clinically and documented by numerous studies. In an inner- city child psychiatry clinic, more than half of the trauma-tized children had syndromal or subsyndromal PTSD, with experiencing physical abuse or witnessing domestic violence being the strongest contributors (Silva et al. 2000). In a large community sample followed prospec-tively into young adulthood, about one-third of the children who had suffered substantiated sexual abuse, physical abuse, or neglect had PTSD (Widom 1999). On average, it is estimated that approximately one-fourth of all individuals who experience major trauma develop PTSD (Breslau et al. 1991). In addition, as described by McFarlane, a definite dose—response relationship exists between the impact of the trauma and PTSD. Still, it is rare even for overwhelming trauma to lead to PTSD in more than half of the exposed populations, clearly suggesting that other etiological factors also play a role (McFarlane 1990). A discussion of such predictors fol-lows." (Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry, Hales, Yudofsky, 2003 AD, p598)
7. "PTSD: Etiology: Kardiner (1959) comprehensively described the phenomenology of war traumatic neurosis, identifying five cardinal features: 1) persistence of startle response, 2) fixation on the trauma, 3) atypical dream life, 4) explosive out-bursts, and 5) overall constriction of personality. He called this condition a physioneurosis , a term implying an interaction of psychological and biological processes, which served as a forerunner of current psychobiological models of PTSD." (Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry, Hales, Yudofsky, 2003 AD, p 600)
8. "Serotonergic system. The serotonergic system has also been implicated (another guess) in the symptomatology of PTSD (van der Kolk and Saporta 1991), although such work is still in its infancy." (Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry, Hales, Yudofsky, 2003 AD, p 601)
9. "Brain circuitry and neuroimaging findings. A number of neuroimaging findings, both structural and functional, in PTSD studies over the past several years have begun to delineate a model suggestive of limbic sensitization and diminished cortical inhibition in PTSD, with specific dysfunction in brain areas involved in memory, emotion, and visuospatial processing (Bremner et al. 1999a)." (Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry, Hales, Yudofsky, 2003 AD, p 601)
10. "Genetics. A large study of Vietnam veteran twins found that genetic factors accounted for 13%-34% of the variance in liability to the various PTSD symptom clusters, whereas no etiological role was found for shared environment (True et al. 1993). Molecular genetic studies of PTSD are sparse. An initial study found an association between PTSD and a polymorphism of the dopamine D2 receptor (Comings et al. 1996); however, this finding was not replicated in a later study (Gelernter et al. 1999)." (Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry, Hales, Yudofsky, 2003 AD, p 602)
11. "Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies: A variety of cognitive and behavioral techniques have gained increasing popularity and validation in the treatment of PTSD. People involved in traumatic events such as accidents frequently develop phobias or phobic anxiety related to or associated with these situations. When a phobia or phobic anxiety is associated with PTSD, systematic desensitization or graded exposure has been found to be effective. This is based on the principle that when patients are gradually exposed to a phobic or anxiety-provoking stimulus, they will become habituated or deconditioned to the stimulus." (Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry, Hales, Yudofsky, 2003 AD, p 606)
C. Cases of depression and anxiety:
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Depression in the DSM-5 |
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Panic Disorder (PD) |
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Postpartum Depression (PPD) |
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Social Phobia (SP) |
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Conclusion:
1. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a behaviour choice not a disease.
2. PTSD is historically known as Hysteria. (click to see details)
3. We all experience very traumatic and stressful things in our lives. This is normal and to be expected. Becoming self-disabled for these common life trauma's is forbidden in the Bible: "If a man won't work, neither let him eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10) This one Bible verse would save taxpayers billions of dollars of wasted cash if put into action.
4. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an emotion that results from a choice whose origin is the human spirit.
5. Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) is a classic example of junk "pop" psychology gone to seed. It is a parasitic vulture industry feeding shamelessly off of cash from insurance companies, public funds and corporations. We all pay for this. Nothing is free.
6. It is important to ask, "What benefit is this individual deriving from engaging in this behaviour of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." Often PTSD is a means to an end for personal gain.
7. There is no scientific evidence that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.
8. Jesus commanded us not to be anxious. Work on your self-control instead of drugs to free yourself of all anxiety.
By Steve Rudd: Contact the author for comments, input or corrections.
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