THE ORIGIN OF PTSS/ PTSD

The origin of the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress offers a quintessential insight into everything that has gone terribly wrong with health care in the United States. That the diagnosis is a con game to bring immense profits to certain pharmaceutical companies makes the story even more egregious. Interestingly enough, because the Veterans' medical system in the US is allowed to negotiate for the cheapest medications possible, no surprise that wounded veterans are the least likely to be instantly diagnosed with the one trauma most likely for battle weary personnel.

So where did the concept of Post Traumatic Stress originate? Forever in the history of warfare, medical personnel and the soldier's family, have readily recognized the after-effects of warfare on soldiers, and civilians caught up in the mess. Returning WWI vets were said to be suffering from shell shock, although because of the stigma against showing weakness, which was considered cowardice, few vets came forward to admit they were in trouble. Also, there was no help.

WWII soldiers faced the same issues of battle fatigue being a sign of cowardice. Returning vets were told to get back to work, take up family life and forget the war. Luckily, there was for the most part, very strong family life and a stable rural environment to come home to and the predictability of this helped immensely. Veterans from the Korean conflict met the same reception.

But the Vietnam war changed everything. Soldiers were faced with conditions and weaponry and chemical (Agent Orange) dousing unlike anything that had occurred before. And returning veterans faced not only civilian hostility but a medical system completely unable to cope with the trauma sustained by these men and women. Veterans faced hell in 'Nam and a kind of purgatory at home. In fact, denial of even battle stress or fatigue was the unwritten code of diagnosis.

Not until the mid-1980's did medical and psychiatric personnel in the US catch on to the illnesses being suffered by these veterans and not in such a way as to FIX the problems, instead the psychiatric and pharmaceutical interests suddenly awoke to the possibility of making a very nice profit from trauma victims and veterans through the for-profit insurance company arrangements. SUCH BEHAVIOR BY MEDICAL PERSONNEL WOULD NOT and COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY.

Medical and mental health practitioners were faced with the fact that drugs could not be prescribed unless the illness was listed in a code book called the DSM. Because battle fatigue or shell shock is not a biological illness it didn't have a code. How to solve the problem? Research the underlying cause of shell shock? No. That wouldn't have been immediately profitable. Instead, a radical change came about in the way an illness was listed in the code book. Battle fatigue or shell shock symptoms were listed as a SYNDROME which was then called an ILLNESS and could then be used to prescribe medications. The first SYNDROME was called PTSS (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome) or PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).

Believe it or not, originally PTSD could only be diagnosed in men who had been in combat. Women were not eligible, even war fatigued nurses! Women who presented with the symptoms now ascribed to PTSD were labeled with hysteria and neurosis, old Freudian terms that degraded the women's complaints to mere malingering. The prescription for a malingering woman was a Valium-type tranquilizer to keep her quiet. Not until 1991, when doctors - women doctors, in Australia, began insisting that women who had been raped had the same symptoms as shell shock victims did the psychiatric community in the US awake to the potential of prescribing the new anti-depressants for women under the PTSD code.