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Dodgy industry of trauma counsellors

  • March 11th, 2015

An interesting book review http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/how-does-one-tell-the-untraumatized-majority-about-the-conditions-that-constitute-the-underworld-of-trauma reminds me of the insubstantial foundation for the burgeoning trauma counselling industry.
The review covers two books and favours The Evil Hours by David Morris

The reviewer summarises many strands teased out by the authors but one could save ACC and the government a lot of money, and more importantly save many ‘victims’ from consolidating their victim hood.

“…. dwelling on one’s infirmities is a prescription for invalidism.
This has implications for policy. We tell people they are broken at great peril because, when they are feeling fragile, they tend to believe it. For example, the VA often grants monthly disability checks to veterans at the first sign of debility. It does so with good intentions, but when it does so prematurely, it discourages one of the most therapeutic activities, which is participation in the workforce. Most vets with PTSD improve with aggressive treatment and rehabilitation, which must come before we evaluate veterans for lasting impairments.”

“Our culture presumes fragility. One force behind this is psychiatrists, who fall prey to the clinician’s illusion, whereby they assume their patients are representative of the wider population. After 9/11, health professionals predicted an epidemic of PTSD that never materialized. Hundreds of millions of dollars went to trauma therapy, and people were subtly encouraged to misinterpret justified sadness and sleeplessness as signs of mental illness. PTSD is also a diagnosis tailored for political use, and it plays into the illusion, dating to the Vietnam era, of the mentally scarred vet, the walking time bomb of films such as Taxi Driver, Rambo, and Coming Home.”

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  • Chris Browne
  • March 12th, 2015
  • 12:22 pm

In the same vein, I commend the review of Christina Hoff Sommers’s book “One Nation under Therapy” by Theodore Dalrymple. The review is entitled “Bad Counsel” and can be found at: .

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  • Chris Browne
  • March 12th, 2015
  • 12:38 pm

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