The big indirect business of trauma and anxiety disorders
x Revolutionary Mind: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a necessary tool for the profit of multinational pharmaceutical companies.
At the time it was a great advance to be able to make the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because it meant naming the symptoms that people who had been anchored in traumatic events and who could not get out of there presented. PTSD has been commonly diagnosed in people who have suffered episodes of war, either as invaders or invaders (the diagnosis of US soldiers who had gone to invade Vietnam and who returned highly traumatized began in 1980), or who have been victims of natural disasters or who have suffered rape at the hands of unknown persons.
To diagnose PTSD it is necessary that "the person has experienced, witnessed or been explained one or more events characterized by deaths or threats to the physical integrity of himself or others." Now, we know that we have experienced a traumatic event because we are able to remember it. However, there is a traumatized population that is very different from these profiles and that, for the most part, extends to areas where the working class lives. It has to do with children who have been born and raised in environments of sexual and family violence, and in communities affected by abuse, neglect and addictions, whether they be gambling, alcohol, cocaine or other types of substances. When they reach adulthood, these people may not necessarily remember their traumas (one of the criteria for diagnosing PTSD), or they may not be concerned about specific memories of their abuse or consciously not make them relevant. they actually have, yet in practice they continue to behave as if they are still in danger. They are permanently on the defensive, suffer from anxiety or anger attacks, can be aggressive or just the opposite, and have depressed moods, among other things. In a broad sense, these types of symptoms are widespread in our society. To some degree, their problems resemble those of war soldiers, but they are also very different in that their childhood trauma has prevented them from developing some of the mental capacities that soldiers possessed before their trauma occurred.
Comrade Prime Ministers and their secret detention centers
And we say "childhood trauma" because the first confusion is in the very definition of trauma. It seems, indeed, that trauma is the one suffered by a person who is the victim of a traffic accident, or a rape in a dark alley, or someone who has seen a murder live. In other words, they are "extreme" cases, similar to those that occur in war conflicts. In the eyes of everyone, it is understandable that this is called trauma. However, in the vast majority of cases, traumas are subjective and not visible to everyone. This is where cases of sexual abuse in the family environment, gender violence, deaths of loved ones, unwanted children, absent parents due to work needs or parents who left home shortly after the baby was born as a result of arguments, infidelities , addictions or simply for having made wrong decisions. The list is long.
Aware of all this, several streams of researchers and psychiatrists since the beginning of the 90s have tried that the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), which is the main diagnostic guide used by psychiatrists both in the US and in Spain to issue their prescriptions, review their approach to trauma and anxiety disorders, including a section where they talk about post-traumatic stress disorder from a broader point of view, that talk about developmental traumas, that is, that the symptoms are not merely pointed out but the multiple social causes that can cause these symptoms.
In this way it is intended to put the accent on 3 problems:
Evidence in locked files, marked "secret". CAS, family and criminal courts. (PRIVATE FILES)
In the first place, to avoid errors in diagnoses that can lead to wrong treatments.
Second, to avoid the constant use of drugs to cover emotional conflicts that can be treated, not in all cases but in a large percentage, without drugs and only with modern psychology tools. Doing the necessary griefs, healing emotional wounds and traumas, restructuring self-esteem, improving nutrition and getting out of harmful environments.
Third, because it is essential to promote real support from the institutions. It is an obstacle to the effectiveness of the therapies to treat a person and then send him back to his life of precariousness and helplessness, and pretend that in these conditions we can help our children in a stable and loving way.
However, the American Psychiatric Association, which is the institution that publishes the DSM, which is now in its fifth edition, has repeatedly opposed changing its point of view on this subject with various banal excuses. The problem is that the DSM is essential for the pharmaceutical industry to earn many millions a year because psychiatrists use it as a diagnostic tool from which to systematically prescribe drugs, managing to "alleviate" a series of symptoms that in many cases They could be treated from psychology, achieving basic solutions or at least considerable improvements and without drugs involved.
Therein lies the challenge of today's psychology. On the one hand, we must open the melon of social causes and denounce that there are political and social conditions that cause a greater number of subjective traumatic experiences and a greater rate of anxiety disorders in working-class neighborhoods and in disadvantaged areas. And on the other hand, while we work to change this system model, we must put on the table that the success rate of trauma and anxiety disorder treatments can be increased without the need to prescribe drugs. There are thousands of everyday cases that can be solved only with psychology tools and with complementary techniques. And in the same way, the new specialized techniques in overcoming trauma are showing that there are many serious psychological cases, and even illnesses in the case of somatization (appearance of physical symptoms that have no justified physical cause), which can be overcome unnecessarily of drugs or medical treatments. But instead of investing in research to make them extensive, they are rejected and labeled "pseudo-science." They do not want to hear about it so that the business of the pharmaceutical industry does not end.
But not only. Accepting these premises implies entering into questioning the current capitalist system, the commodification of health, the privatization policies not only in hospitals but also in shelters for minors, prisons and security forces that are part of a network that is dedicated to "contain" the population that suffers in their flesh the consequences of a system that is not focused on people's well-being but on profit.
Child mental torture is the order of the day in this country, where it is projected with excessive sadism and brutality that the perpetrators exert on their little victims
Courts From Hell -- Family InJustice in Canada
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