earlgraytay:

fuck-ler:

…dare I say veterans being the public image of PTSD in america is deliberate propaganda to make us sympathize with soldiers who kill people overseas ? way more women have PTSD than men, and a lot have it from sexual and domestic violence, not combat.

So here’s the thing. The reason the ‘public image of PTSD in america’ is veterans has a lot more to do with history (both past and current) than anything else.

Humans are not very good at sussing out cause from effect. It’s not immediately obvious that the constellation of symptoms we call PTSD is a constellation. Sure, some of it is immediately obvious- of course if you got in a car accident you’d be scared of shoddy driving afterwards- but some of it (aggression, memory issues, fatigue) doesn’t have anything obvious to do with I Had A Traumatic Thing Happen And Things Are Bad Now.

 If you don’t know that trauma can cause damage to your brain on a small-scale level, it’s easy to blame the symptoms of PTSD on the thing that is causing the PTSD.  “Alice has been so moody since she broke up with her [creepy, rapey] boyfriend.” “Ozma hasn’t ever been the same since her husband died. It’s sad when someone’s widowed so young.” 

“Poor Jenny married that terrible man, it’s so sad how much he’s ground her down.” And if you’re living in a time and place where most people are suffering many small traumas – say, most of human history- it’s easy to write the symptoms of PTSD off as just Part Of Growing Up. 

…Now here’s the rub. If you send a perfectly healthy, happy 20-something-year-old off to war, and they Come Back Different, it’s a lot easier to notice. You’re not seeing the things that caused their PTSD on a day to day basis; you’re seeing the Before and After, like shitty gym photographs. And if you send an entire town’s worth of healthy, happy 20-somethings off to war, and most of them don’t come back at all and the ones who come back Come Back Different… even the most vehemently pro-abuse assholes in this world will notice that something is deeply, deeply wrong.

We discovered that PTSD exists because of the World Wars – particularly World War One. We discovered that there is a chronic condition that is the result of seeing too many atrocities because basically an entire generation of young (European) men died and even the most asshole-y of assholes couldn’t explain it away. These were Good Brave Young Men going off to Serve Their Country ™, they hadn’t been weak or foolish or ‘done’ anything to bring shell shock down on themselves, and the difference between them before and after shell shock set in was like night and day. It was pretty much the frictionless-cows-in-a-vaccuum situation for ‘proving’ that PTSD exists.  

Time went on, scientists properly started studying this stuff, and they figured out that PTSD was the same phenomenon regardless of whether it was caused by a year on the front lines or fifteen years of marital rape. Because- let me reiterate- it’s not immediately obvious that it’s the same thing. Once they figured it out, yeah, in hindsight it’s bloody obvious that more women have PTSD than men and that rape/abuse/miscarriage/etc. have a lot to do with that. 

But because of the early years when PTSD was equated to shell shock, most people still associate the two. And most older people in America will particularly equate the two because Vietnam. Yeah, some of the ‘Vietnam Vets With PTSD’ thing was probably overblown in the interest of sensationalism (whether to sentimentalize Those Poor Veterans or to fearmonger against Those Scary Violent Poor People).  

 But the thing is… Vietnam was the first time since WWI that we’d had that Spherical Cows In A Vacuum situation, at least in the USA. It was the first time we’d had a war that was big enough to suck in an entire generation, that was ugly enough to fuck up an entire generation-  that was also unpopular enough that people felt safe saying that they’d gotten fucked up from it. 

If you were a WWII veteran, you couldn’t really say ‘the war was a stupid pointless hell and I wish we’d never fought it’ Because Nazis. Hell, even if you’d fought in the Korean War, you couldn’t really say “the war was a stupid pointless hell and I wish we’d never fought it’ Because Commies. You were doing the right thing. You were Making The World Safe For Democracy. Saying anything else was wrong. But Vietnam was unpopular enough that there were plenty of places where you could say “hey, the war sucked, it fucked me up, I wish I’d never gone” and people would agree with you. 

So for a lot of Baby Boomers and older Gen Xers, their first experience with PTSD was their dads or uncles or brothers, or their friends’ dads or uncles or brothers, coming back from Vietnam and coming back all fucked up. And then the TV talking about veterans with PTSD. And then learning about it at school. And so on, and so forth. 

The youngest Gen Xers are only in their 30s. The people who have been in their careers long enough to shape the ‘public image’ of things in any way are, by and large, people who grew up during Vietnam and its immediate aftermath. In the same way that, if you grew up around 2001 in America, your immediate mental association with the word “terrorist” is most likely Osama Bin Ladin (and not, say, a cult letting off sarin gas in the subways or angry white school shooters), people who grew up around Vietnam will immediately associate ‘PTSD’ with ‘veteran’. And they have reasons for doing so- reasons that mean they will do so without any propagandistic intent on their part. 

Considering that the USA puts out plenty of legitimate, obvious, banally terrifying pro-military propaganda- can you think twice before you cheapen that word, please? It’s a lot harder to convince people that, no, really, it’s not normal to have the military advertise on public transit if leftists run around calling any kind of pro-military or pro-veteran sentiment propaganda.