Author claims "Our Overdiagnosis of PTSD In Vets Is Enough to Make You Sick"

Hmm, and exactly what does he think causes civilians to be treated for PTSD? Cops? Firefighters? The people in New York City after 9-11? Hurricane survivors? Tornado survivors?

There are several traumatic events linked to PTSD and the going rate is one out of three. Some say one out of five. While 100% may experience a "shock" from the event, get depressed or have nightmares, usually after 30 days, it wears off even if it never really goes away. There are also different levels of PTSD, and one reason why therapists say getting help sooner is better than waiting because mild PTSD is easier to treat and heal than chronic PTSD allowed to feed off life afterwards.

In 2006 when this piece was written, redeployments were already a factor in the increased number of PTSD diagnosis. In other words, trauma piled onto trauma and in too many cases, untreated. Now there are PTSD veterans being redeployed on medication but no therapy. I bet the Staff Sgt. Bales case will be tied to medication considering by accounts he was sent back with PTSD and TBI. One medication may work for someone but cause a list of problems for someone else. Ever listen to the warnings on commercials for most medications being advertised?

Anyway, back to this claim being made. Combat veterans have traumatic experiences over and over again. For most, they are under 25, which most experts say is when the emotional part of the brain is fully developed, thus, opening the door to traumatic events taking over. Considering how many leave high school and join the service, most experts say the numbers of veterans filing claims is no where near what they should be. In other words, they don't want the label and don't file claims. Getting a combat veteran to file a claim for a disability is hard as hell. I've heard "I don't deserve help" more than "Where do I go to get it" making me spend more time trying to get them to understand they wouldn't need help if they didn't serve than I do helping them with their spiritual needs.

Claims made on this article do not take into account much at all and that is very depressing.

The PTSD Trap: Our Overdiagnosis of PTSD In Vets Is Enough to Make You Sick
By David Dobbs
March 22, 2012

The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap

by David Dobbs

In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens’s problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: The condition was real, he knew, but as a diagnosis he saw it being dangerously overemphasized.

Stevens led the medics tending an armored brigade of 800 soldiers, and his team patched together GIs and Iraqi citizens almost every day. He saw horrific things. Once home, he had his share, he says, of “nights where I’d wake up and it would be clear I wasn’t going to sleep again.”

He was not surprised: “I would expect people to have nightmares for a while when they came back.” But as he kept track of his unit in the U.S., he saw troops greeted by both a larger culture and a medical culture, especially in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), that seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD.

“Clinicians aren’t separating the few who really have PTSD from those who are experiencing things like depression or anxiety or social and reintegration problems, or who are just taking some time getting over it,” says Stevens. He worries that many of these men and women are being pulled into a treatment and disability regime that will mire them in a self-fulfilling vision of a brain rewired, a psyche permanently haunted.

Stevens, now a major, and still on reserve duty while he works as a physician’s assistant, is far from alone in worrying about the reach of PTSD. Over the last five years or so, a long-simmering academic debate over PTSD’s conceptual basis and rate of occurrence has begun to boil over into the practice of trauma psychology and to roil military culture as well. Critiques, originally raised by military historians and a few psychologists, are now being advanced by a broad array of experts, including giants of psychology, psychiatry, diagnosis, and epidemiology such as Columbia’s Robert Spitzer and Michael First, who oversaw the last two editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-III and DSM-IV; Paul McHugh, the longtime chair of Johns Hopkins University’s psychiatry department; Michigan State University epidemiologist Naomi Breslau; and Harvard University psychologist Richard McNally, a leading authority in the dynamics of memory and trauma, and perhaps the most forceful of the critics. The diagnostic criteria for PTSD, they assert, represent a faulty, outdated construct that has been badly overextended so that it routinely mistakes depression, anxiety, or even normal adjustment for a unique and particularly stubborn ailment.

This quest to scale back the definition of PTSD and its application stands to affect the expenditure of billions of dollars, the diagnostic framework of psychiatry, the effectiveness of a huge treatment and disability infrastructure, and, most important, the mental health and future lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. combat veterans and other PTSD patients. Standing in the way of reform is conventional wisdom, deep cultural resistance and foundational concepts of trauma psychology. Nevertheless it is time, as Spitzer recently argued, to “save PTSD from itself.”
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