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Flame » in reply to re: But PTSD isn't real.

Social Constructions
SDAI-Tech1 — (archived)

That's a nice spin. Almost all psychological/psychiatric disorders can, under scrutiny, be labeled as "social constructions" - whether it be schizophrenia or attention deficit disorder.

The notion that some political and cultural elites in the LBJ/Nixon/Ford era concocted PTSD as a political tool to diminish antiwar veterans has very little ring of truth. Vietnam was not Nixon's war but was commited to by two Democrat Presidents after we assisted and slowly replaced the incapable French stationed in Vietnam.

If PTSD was concocted as some sort of discrediting mechanism it would be by those whose political careers hung on the decision to aid the South Vietnamese. So if indeed it were a "social construct" it would have been constructed by pro-war Democrats such as LBJ and his administration. And to be honest, I don't think most anyone in Johnson's administration really cared about discrediting the limited number of vocal antiwar veterans or possessed the mental acuity to spend time to "invent" a disease that would somehow, hopefully, socially discredit a small number of vocal antiwar veterans.

PTSD was likely coined and repeated by those career climbing medical professionals who wanted a new term for "shell shocked" veterans and a condition which had been recorded and evident after most all previous wars and those who suffered mentally for participation in same. After that coining, the liberal media elite caught on and used the term not to disparage veterans but to elevate them to a new class of "victimhood" - the victims of an unpopular war which created a horrible "new" disease.

One only need thumb through old TIME and LIFE magazines of this era to see the massive antiwar agenda being pushed on their readership. Antiwar articles such as LIFE's "One week's dead" picture album of casualties only served to accelerate the death of newsprint picture media that could not compete with the ever growing draw of television news. LIFE would close shop even before the Vietnam war ended, not realizing that the Nixon-era "squares" who had been buying picture weeklies such as LIFE were actually pro-war, anti-communist and didn't enjoy reading depressing pieces meant to disparage US foreign policy.

Ironically, in the early fifties and throughout the entire Eisenhower and Kennedy years, the New York Times in their Sunday Magazine would repeatedly lament the plight of the poor "South East Asians" in Vietnam struggling for independence, glorify the assistance they were receiving from the French, and call for more intervention and assistance! Not only did the NYT and the "elite" of mainstream print media call for intervention and point to the plight of those 3rd worlders fighting for their freedom (when most American had never even heard of them and were already tired of Korea), but they turned around fifteen years later and demonized the very US participation in Vietnam they had made such a pressing global social need for civilized nations to undertake!

The popularity of comparing today's events with Vietnam, and finding some parallel to discredit the Bush administration and the efforts in Iraq, only works with those who are under thirty and have no recollection of the events that led up to it or the necessary resources to verify and evaluate such a comparison. Enough time has passed and the rewriting of such history to further new needs can be safely undertaken.

Reclassifying PTSD into some "social construct" that was invented somehow to discredit antiwar veterans can, in my view, be categorized as such a politically motivated endeavor designed to give comfort to those who embrace the historically illiterate notion that being antiwar and having a decorative rather than functional US military somehow leads to global peace and prosperity.

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