So-called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) emerged in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when veterans were having difficulties overcoming the brutal events they had witnessed.

Three American psychiatrists coined the term PTSD and lobbied for its inclusion in the 1980 edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) “billing bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

Professors Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk, authors of Making Us Crazy, say that most of the soldiers suffered the effects of participating in “atrocities, seeing grotesquely mutilated bodies, or going on particularly dangerous missions.” Those who suffered the mental effects of this were experiencing battle fatigue, or in other words, exhaustion, not “mental illness.”

Dr. Thomas Dorman, a member of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and Canada, stated, “In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of ‘disease,’ formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.”

By “formalizing consensus,” Dr. Dorman refers to the process where “disorders” are literally voted into existence by a show of APA committee hands.

Testifying before the U.S. Congress in 1992, psychiatrist Walter Afield said, “Psychiatry is not an exact science. It generates enormous fear on the part of everybody, and the insurance companies are petrified. … You can’t create a broken hip. However, we can create mental illness with selective and careful advertising.”

Today, post traumatic stress disorder has become “stretched and blurred,” says Tana Dineen, Ph.D., author of Manufacturing Victims. There are some 175 combinations of symptoms by which PTSD can be diagnosed. “The application of PTSD has resulted in everything being pathologized until the only way to be is to be ‘abnormal,’” Dr. Dineen said.

Kutchins and Kirk further stated that PTSD “has become the label for identifying the impact of adverse events on ordinary people. This means that normal responses to catastrophic events have often been interpreted as mental disorders.”
72 They further stated, “The APA and its minions will not even acknowledge that they are creating public policy. As they explain it, they are simply making diagnoses (and in the process making many more of us crazy).”

With PTSD “authenticated” through its inclusion in the DSM, psychiatrists paved the way for millions of dollars in funding to train “disaster workers” in psychological counseling.

How effective has it been?

Professor Yvonne McEwan from Scotland, who advised the U.S. government after the Oklahoma bombing, said that psychological trauma counseling at best is useless, and at worst highly destructive to victims seeking help. “By medicalizing what is a non-medical condition and introducing a therapy subject matter that is vastly under-researched, over-used and vastly abused, medicine is propping up a lot of dwindling careers,” she says.

A 1996 psychiatric study conducted on 110 burn victims revealed that those who received psychiatric trauma counseling were three times more likely to suffer long-term problems. Lead researcher, Dr. Jonathan Bisson, said: “… those that received the debriefings fared worse than those who received nothing at all.”

Professor Richard McNally of Harvard University warns: “Informed consent comes in here. You have to tell your employees that you are making a therapy available that, based on the best information in the scientific literature, will likely do nothing to help and might actually make matters worse— do you still want it?”

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