While I applaud efforts to assist
Soldiers returning from war zones, victims of violent crime and sexual abuse, can now be helped by cognitive behaviour therapy, where they learn to assign terrible memories to the past, instead of them crowding their present and future
I'm somewhat hesitant to believe, let alone trust any effort by a group that depends on the continuation of symptmology for it's paycheck to take up this effort on a wholesale basis.
Professor Devilly says the therapy is working.
"We're now getting, at the end of between 8 and 12 sessions, 90 to 92 per cent of people no longer meet the criteria for PTSD," he said.
Is it just me, or is there an actual correlation between the number of sessions that the "average" MH health insurance policy will authorize and the number of sessions needed to achieve these results?
And is it just me, or is there some correlation between the discovery of a "cure" and the recent astronomical increase in the number of PTSD disability claims that DOD/VA/.gov is facing?
Now psychologists are working to fend off post traumatic stress in high-risk occupations, by teaching recruits to develop resilience.
Uh huh. The average recruit into the all-volunteer military has personality characteristics so strikingly different from the rest of their compatriots in the general population that this goal is, IMHO, bordering on bringing coal to Newcastle.
Finally, what implication(s) will this have on those who have already been diasgnosed with PTSD? Will the Am. Psychiatric Assn. and its boards change their mind and declare that one may be released from a diagnosis at some time? And will that decision be tied in any way to the possibility that disability compensation may be withdrawn based on this announcement that there is a "cure"?
As I have mentioned before, I carry a PTSD diagnosis. Currently there is no way to get that wiped off my record - no, not the VA record but the MH system's record. Once diagnosed, always that diagnosis, just like the alcoholics. I am not currently receiving, or seeking, disability compensation although there is a very good chance that under the current rules I could easily qualify. It's not the intrusive thoughts so much that trouble me but the "coping skills" I developed to deal with them. I figured out how to put the memories of the past in the passt, and keep them out of the present and the future. It just happened that in order to be able to do that I adopted certain behaviors that others say are less than desirable. Do I give up what works when all the other alternatives offered so far have not? Or has the art of MH treatment figured out some brand new set of behaviors that nobody has ever contemplated before that might - or might not - work for me? I'm just wondering why I have not heard of that new paradigm yet.
stay safe.