Politics, fraud, and PTSD

Last week, the VA made a move that at first blush may seem like a good thing – but it isn’t. Sally Satel over at the WSJ gives us a good overview.

Veterans with unrelenting PTSD can receive disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. As retired Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, secretary of Veterans Affairs, said last week, the mental injuries of war “can be as debilitating as any physical battlefield trauma.” The occasion for his remark was a new VA rule allowing veterans to receive disability benefits for PTSD if, as non-combatants, they had good reason to fear hostile activity, such as firefights or explosions. In other words, veterans can now file a benefits claim for being traumatized by events they did not actually experience.

As I have covered over at my homeblog since I started back in 2004 – though PTSD is real, it is also something that has a long history as being used as a source of fraud, but even worse, as a way to marginalize veterans; their opinions, their job prospects, their profession.

There is money to be had in disability – and there is attention to be gained by victim-hood by the Stolen Valor Brigade of poseurs. This new rule opens the door to the worse in our society to practice PTSD fraud.

Even under the old rules, PTSD fraud was/is common. An outstanding primer on this can be found from B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley’s tremendously important book, Stolen Valor : How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History.

Back to Sally though, she reviews the template as we know it,

… portrayals of the Vietnam veteran as the kind of “walking time bomb” as immortalized in films such as “Taxi Driver” and “Rambo.” In the summer of 1972, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Post-Vietnam Syndrome. It reported that 50% of all Vietnam veterans–not just combat veterans–needed professional help to readjust, and contained phrases such as “psychiatric casualty,” “emotionally disturbed” and “men with damaged brains.” By contrast, veterans of World War II were heralded as heroes. They fought in a popular war, a vital distinction in understanding how veterans and the public give meaning to their wartime hardships and sacrifice.

It is, of course, a false template – but one that has done tremendous damage to Vietnam veterans – a group who actually has better “life skills” statistics than the general population – again as outlined in Burkett’s book.

Hollyweird and the Left knows the power of this template – hence such garbage movies we have seen over the last decade up to and including this year’s The Dry Land.

Though there are good people who are trying to do good things – the pop-culture PTSD undercurrent is driven largely by people who have not served in combat, have a paycheck in the game, and/or see little in a military veteran’s years of service but his own victim-hood.

If everything is PTSD – then nothing is – and that means that those who actually have real PTSD will find services diluted, funds diverted, and their case lost in a sea of fraud.

On the political side, the Leftist logic train runs like this: if anyone in the military can have PTSD – then all have it. If everyone in the military has PTSD, they are not well. If they are not well, then they are to be pitied. If they are to be pitied, then they are not my peer. If they are not my peer, then their opinion is of no value. If their opinion is of no value, it can be ignored. If they can be ignored, no one will take them seriously. If no one takes them seriously, they have no power. If they have no power – they cannot get in my way.

Quod erat demonstrandum.