The Mental Health Crisis That Wasn't

Or, How the trauma industry exploited 9/11:

Therapism is a worldview that valorizes openness and emotional self-absorption; it assumes that vulnerability, rather than strength, characterizes the American psyche, and that a diffident, anguished, and emotionally apprehensive public requires a vast array of therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counselors, workshoppers, healers, and traumatologists to lead it through the trials of everyday life.

In fact, there is no evidence that large segments of the population are in psychological free fall. On the contrary, researchers who follow the protocols of social science find most Americans-young and old-faring quite well. If they're crashing and burning, they don't seem to know it. This has proven true even in the wake of terrible disasters.

...

In October 2001 Sharon Kahn, a senior psychologist at Coney Island Hospital, manned the phones at a televised call-in show sponsored by PBS and called Reach Out to Heal. Experts described the symptoms of traumatic stress, and viewers were urged to phone in with questions and to get referrals for help.

Kahn took calls all evening. She referred a grand total of two people for therapy. The vast bulk of the calls were queries about the resumption of regularly scheduled programming.

...

In New York City on September 11 there was a strong, spontaneous show of collective resolve and organization. Near Ground Zero, members of one tenant association helped direct the streams of people running from the World Trade Center; they formed an "urgent needs" team to check on homebound residents; they acted as volunteer cashiers in stores when paid employees could not get to the area. The calm and orderly behavior of workers evacuating the World Trade Center towers themselves surely kept the death and injury tolls from rising. In the largest waterborne evacuation in our history, half a million people left lower Manhattan. Barges, sailboats, and ferries, with no instructions, put into the port as the towers burned. "If you're out in the water in a pleasure craft and you see those buildings on fire," the Rutgers sociologist Lee Clarke said to The New York Times, "in a strictly rational sense, you should head to New Jersey. Instead people went into potential danger and rescued strangers."

According to the sociologist Henry Quarantelli, a pioneer in the field of disaster research, such constructive responses are typical. "Mythical beliefs to the contrary," he writes, "disaster victims do not panic, they are not passive, they do not become caught up in [selfish and] antisocial behavior, and they are not behaviorally traumatized." Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist with the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, laments the predominance of the "pathological model." So often, she says, officials and mental health planners neglect the positive human elements that crisis elicits, such as "reasoned caution, resourcefulness, adaptability, resiliency, hopefulness, and humanitarianism."

Another long and interesting article from RedNova. I post this because to me, this is another aspect of the Cult of Victimhood which plagues us, trying to tell us that we are better being victims than defending ourselves and/or picking ourselves up and recovering when something bad happens. These are the "we're sorry for everything" people who seem to think that the more victimized you are, the more highly evolved you are. Or something.