|
Thomas Donnelly: The Military Epidemics That Aren't
[WSJ] A wildly off-base trend is medicalizing the armed forces as a group of victims, patients and predators.
| Psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent? |
| That's happened in history once or twice. But the trend amongst the Left in America is more about attacking the military -- the Left refuses to believe that military people would join the service, let alone stay in, with eyes open. So either they're children (didn't know what they were doing) or victims (e.g., poverty, racism, etc) or damaged (PTSD) or predators (wannabe Rambos). The Left simply won't credit our military people as being sensible adults. To borrow a phrase, it doesn't fit the narrative. |
| To be fair, there is a lot of medicalizing of civilians nowadays as well. Not long ago PTSD was diagnosed only in those who had fought in war, or lived through something rare and excruciating like genocide. Then rape and bad car accidents were added. Now it's pretty much any severe anxiety problem that can be traced to an event or a repeated kind of experience. The reason being, techniques invented to deal with the most severe forms of post-traumatic stress seem to work on the merely quite debilitating as well. |
Posted by: Besoeker 2013-08-18 |
