Posted on 05/25/2014 4:21:51 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Bessel van der Kolk sat cross-legged on an oversize pillow in the center of a smallish room overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur. He wore khaki pants, a blue fleece zip-up and square wire-rimmed glasses. His feet were bare. It was the third day of his workshop, “Trauma Memory and Recovery of the Self,” and 30 or so workshop participants — all of them trauma victims or trauma therapists — lined the room’s perimeter. They, too, sat barefoot on cushy pillows, eyeing van der Kolk, notebooks in hand. For two days, they had listened to his lectures on the social history, neurobiology and clinical realities of post-traumatic stress disorder and its lesser-known sibling, complex trauma. Now, finally, he was about to demonstrate an actual therapeutic technique, and his gaze was fixed on the subject of his experiment: a 36-year-old Iraq war veteran named Eugene, who sat directly across from van der Kolk, looking mournful and expectant.
Van der Kolk began as he often does, with a personal anecdote. “My mother was very unnurturing and unloving,” he said. “But I have a full memory and a complete sense of what it is like to be loved and nurtured by her.” That’s because, he explained, he had done the very exercise that we were about to try on Eugene. Here’s how it would work: Eugene would recreate the trauma that haunted him most by calling on people in the room to play certain roles. He would confront those people — with his anger, sorrow, remorse and confusion — and they would respond in character, apologizing, forgiving or validating his feelings as needed.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I believe that President Bush is correct in insisting it simply be called Post Traumatic Stress. The thought is it is an injury, not a “Disorder”. Often times the word “Disorder” is associated with negative connotations that somehow there is something wrong with the person... not wrong with the overwhelming environments the sufferer has been exposed to.
I think that’s an excellent point. I also think that a variety of therapeutic approaches can work for different people, and the more that’s tried, the more people will benefit.
It should be called “Let’s Pretend”.
If I'm not mistaken, "disorder" allows docs to prescribe meds for anything and everything.
Allen FRances, MD, who was head of the DSM-4 committee and the loudest objector to DSM-5 writes about this situation:
"Careless diagnosis then leads to careless treatment. Rates of prescribing psychiatric drugs have skyrocketed, as has polypharmacy -- that is, the use of multiple, often interacting drugs, often in recklessly high doses. Several hundred troops die each year from accidental or deliberate overdoses of prescription drugs.
You can read more in his article, "Reported High Rates of Military Mental Illness Are Wrong and Dangerous"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allen-frances/reported-high-rates-of-mi_b_4905631.html
In general, the DSM-5 created endless "disorders" that require medication. More than 2/3 of the members of that committee had ties to BigPharma.
I would try anything for any ailment or condition before resorting to drugs. I rather like what this therapist is doing. Much trauma lodges in the body and cannot be released by the mind alone.
Friend of mine was a chiropractor and a Rolfer. (Rolfing is deep and painful release of fascia, the tissue that binds muscles together.) One of his patients had been a photographer in Nam, was a serious stress case. When my friend Rolfed his feet, the photog burst into loud and long sobs. He had, he said, been in Nam, walked across a field of bodies, a very traumatic experience for a noncombatant or for anyone, and he’d been in distress ever since. Releasing that stress physically, in his feet, was the beginning of recovery for him.
No drug in the world would have helped, except perhaps to numb him. But who wants to walk around numb?.
Females are going to change everything about the military, including PTSD and the VA, and in time, everything will be dealt with as the female being the primary subject and focus, what suits females, will become the normal.
We have watched that happen in law, and every facet of civilian life, since about 1970.
When females enter a workplace, University, or any environment, then it gets feminized, masculinity is always suppressed, and comes to be something that is always a lingering problem to be solved and overcome, and removed.
Excerpt from the article: “It’s not the first time van der Kolk has been there. In the early 1990s, he was a lead defender of repressed-memory therapy, which the Harvard psychologist Richard McNally later called “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental-health field since the lobotomy era.” Van der Kolk served as an expert witness in a string of high-profile sexual-abuse cases that centered on the recovery of repressed memories, testifying that it was possible — common, even — for victims of extreme or repeated sexual trauma to suppress all memory of that trauma and then recall it years later in therapy.”
Yes there are many careless... reckless “Disorder” diagnoses by “medical professionals”... another very notable “Disorder” with severe stigma damage is a “Borderline Personality Disorder”... Imagine how damaging just the insinuation that the patient’s personality is so flawed, when most often what is happening is an “inappropriate” reaction to traumatic stress.
Case in point, and many may disagree, is Amanda Knox... the woman didn’t react appropriately as the Italian police railroaded her, and suffered deeply as a result. I doubt she will ever be the same.
I come from an Irish background and LAUGH "inappropriately" sometimes when things go very wrong. They're probably coming to take me away as I write this.
Meanwhile, severe but "appropriately drugged" nutcases shoot up schools.
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