New treatment for soldiers with PTSD to be done by drill sergeants, positive thinking. [View All]

[madfloridian]

A psychologist at Huffington Post points out that the new treatment being prescribed by the Pentagon for soldiers with PTSD is more like positive thinking. Here is an important paragraph from his post:

Vets with PTSD: When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again--Tell Him to 'Think Positively

...the upper echelon in the Pentagon, without the consultation, support, and agreement of military mental health professionals, decided to divert potential mental health treatment funds to what is a pseudo-treatment when applied to treatment and prevention of PTSD. Upon investigation it appears that this "treatment" is designed more to manipulate troops into denying their need for care than to actually treat them.

Here is more about the new Pentagon decision to treat PTSD with positive thinking.

So what is really going on here? In truth, the military has once again retained the positive psychologists, this time to help it use limited mental health resources to try to suck one last measure of devotion from a bone weary combat force many of whom have already been through multiple deployments. It is doing this under the guise of trying to prevent depression and PTSD.

The effects of repeated deployments - particularly with short "dwell times" at home stations between them are cumulative, General Casey has acknowledged. "All our studies show that the more times you deploy with little time between deployments, the more susceptible you are to having mental fitness challenges," the General said. In this regard it is telling that the new program will not be implemented by trained mental health professionals. Instead, it will be administered by drill sergeants. As Seligman conveniently notes, ''They are the teachers in the army"

This part really strikes home. The author points out that it could be saving resources for the continuance of war.

Is this to help the soldiers be more resilient or is it to make them more compliant and to gripe less. If it is the latter, why can't we just say that?

Of course, the reason is that we prefer to deceive and manipulate than to confront the truth about the excessive demands we are making on our troops and pony up the added resources we need if we are going to remain a nation at war.

In my mind this kind of "positive thinking" is actually manipulation. It is being used by religion and business in America to keep people from questioning their circumstances, perhaps to keep them more complacent.

In one of her columns Robyn Blumner of the St. Pete Times spoke of this issue.

The impotence of positive thinking

She mentions Joel Osteen's book, The Secret:

The Secret became a runaway bestseller by telling readers that they could have anything they want just by imagining it. The book was obviously unadulterated bunk, but it sold madly as people grasped at any chance to better their lives. One has to wonder if such magical thinking would have been so popular if people felt they had temporal power to change the conditions of their work and prospects. The reason that so many Americans work at jobs that don't pay enough is not that they don't channel enough positive energy into getting a better salary, but that wages have been stagnant for 30 years. And the reason that wages have barely budged is that America's wealthiest households have kept slicing themselves a larger piece of the income pie.

Between 1979 and 2007, the top 1 percent of American households saw their share of all pretax income nearly double while the bottom 80 percent had their share fall by 7 percent. Ehrenreich quotes the New York Times saying, "It's as if every household in the bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent."

Every working stiff in the bottom 80 percent should be outraged and politically motivated to force change. But if everyone is convinced of the convenient nostrum that our own attitude controls how much we are paid, then workers won't band together to demand a larger share of our national prosperity. This positive thinking message is a kind of opiate that has been particularly effective on the white-collar corporate work force. Ehrenreich documents how corporations hire motivational speakers to convince laid-off workers that their job loss is "an opportunity for self-transformation." Somehow, she says, white-collar workers have accepted positive thinking as a "belief system" that says a person can be "infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds."

That refers to Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bright-Sided.

Relentless positive thinking

And Ehrenreich reminds us again that this is such a convenient policy for business leaders.

"But nowhere did it find a warmer welcome than in American business, which is, of course, also global business. To the extent that positive thinking had become a business itself, business was its principal client, eagerly consuming the good news that all things are possible through an effort of mind. This was a useful message for employees, who by the turn of the twenty-first century were being required to work longer hours for fewer benefits and diminishing job security. But it was also a liberating ideology for top-level executives. What was the point in agonizing over balance sheets and tedious analyses of risks — and why bother worrying about dizzying levels of debt and exposure to potential defaults — when all good things come to those who are optimistic enough to expect them?"

Bryant Welch's post at Huffington Post shows his true alarm as a psychologist at this method being used on our military.

This makes returning veterans a ticking time bomb for serious mental illness with a very real danger of violence to themselves, their loved ones, and the general public. As a psychologist who has treated many serious cases of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, it was a jaw dropping experience to learn that under a new $119 million military program these young men and women who have sacrificed so much will have their PTSD addressed with a superficial, psychological treatment based loosely on Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking, known in this generation's iteration as "positive psychology" or the "psychology of optimism.

There is no evidence that the techniques of positive psychology can prevent or ameliorate the effects of PTSD. When its adherents' attempt to extrapolate simplistic studies done on normal junior high students to military combat troops struggling with military traumas they are misleading the military, the public, and, most importantly, the troops.

Thinking positive is a good thing, but not to the exclusion of needed medical care. Not to the exclusion of common sense.