An intriguing and provocative theory about why American soldiers suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder at a higher rate than other soldiers:
American writer Ethan Watters's recent book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the Western Psyche, offers a highly subversive answer. It is that American society has been permeated by psychoanalytical beliefs about the fragility of the human mind.
This creates an expectation, he argues, that people who have been through horrible experiences will be traumatized. The veterans are simply falling in with that expectation, and exhibiting the symptoms that the theory says they should be showing.
[. . .]
Is PTSD really caused by what happened to veterans while they served in the military, or by the expectations of the civilian society they returned to afterwards? Suddenly, there is a case to answer.
That's from Gynne Dyer, who has long held the view that the number of PTSD cases began to increase in 1945, the year Western armies stopped merely training soldiers to shoot and started training them to kill, with training designed to override their moral objections: "They had been tricked into doing something that was morally abhorrent to them, and that was why so many of them fell apart afterwards."
I think there's something to the self-fulfilling-prophecy effects of what George Will has called the "therapeutic culture." From childhood on, he writes, Americans are told by "experts" that "it is healthy for them continuously to take their emotional temperature, inventory their feelings and vent them." We expect students to be traumatized by a classmate who dies in a horrible car crash, so we bring in grief counselors to help them get those raw feelings out there and, lo and behold, they are traumatized. When I was in 7th grade, a classmate shot herself. We never knew whether it was really suicide or an accident or an atttempt to scare her parents, but we speculated endlessly about it, for a few days. If we'd had a grief counselor, we'd probably have brooded over the trauma for months.
(via Instapundit)
Comments
Kind of makes you wonder how the Earth's population ever survived thousands of years of wars without the benefits of "therapy".
Rape, Tim.
Harl, I don't understand your comment, could you clarify?
The defining symptom of PTSD is recurrent nightmares that wake up the victim. It seems to me that waking up several times a night and grasping for a loved one for comfort is likely to result in children on a fairly frequent basis.
To be specific, no population has ever survived thousands of years of wars; in fact, it's rare that a population survives a century. That population, however, will produce a new generation that may not live any longer than the first one, but it will be around longer, by dint of being born later.