VA and Mental Health Industry

Some Important Developments in PTSD Remediation

  • In the early ‘70s the heavy hitters working with PTSD Veterans discovered that:
    • PTSD is NOT a ‘Mental Illness’ but a ‘Spiritual’ issue.
      • It doesn’t take a mental giant to intuit that Spiritual problems are not going to respond well to Opiates and Industrial Strength Pharmaceuticals.
    • PTSD does NOT respond to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT or ”Talk Therapy”) (which was the “cutting edge” treatment in the 60s and 70s).
      • CBT has NO effect on PTSD – apart from annoying the patient.
    • That having been said:
      • It was NEARLY A DECADE LATER, in the early 80s, that the VA and the Mental Health Industry “Invented” PTSD and described it in the Directory of S—– M—– (DSM) – as a Character Disorder!!!
      • And TEN YEARS after THAT they began some half-assed, play-pretend attempts to treat it (which all came to naught).
      • FIFTY YEARS ON, CBT (and, of course, Industrial Strength Pharmaceuticals) are still the VA’s  and the Mental Industry’s treatment modalities of choice.
  • Some other interesting developments:
    • Nobody who doesn’t have PTSD can understand it or comprehend what it’s like.
    • Which explains why Talk Therapy doesn’t work.
    • Addictions are similarly impossible for a non-addict to comprehend.
    • It’s been demonstrated for nearly a century that empathy is the only effective healing modality we have for alcoholism and drug addiction.
    • Peer groups are the only effective, solution to these problems we know of so far.
    • Being empathy driven, they lend themselves perfectly to remediation of Spiritual issues. Spiritual problems cry out for Holistic solutions!
    • Similarly Hypnotherapy, NLP, EFT, etc have proven effective (and relatively affordable).
    • But because there’s not much money (or, just as importantly, requirements for academic credentials) for those treatment modalities, the VA and the Mental Health Industry will have nothing to do with them.  That isn’t going to change.
    • At some point, we must distinguish between treatment (what the VA does) Oand Healing or Recovery (what our people actually need):
    • Treatment Modalities treat symptoms. Healing/Recovery deals with root causes.
    • Ultimately, healing/recovery, being empathy driven, will result only from Holistic Healing modalities and ongoing participation in Peer Groups.