PTSD is a hoax, a fake, like fibromyalgia or Lyme disease. Bunkum and nonsense.
Do you really believe that Lyme disease is a hoax, bunkum and nonsense?
Lyme disease is very real and caused by the bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi. Blood tests can detect the disease not only in humans but also in other animals like dogs that contract it from tick bites and suffer from it. It is treated medically with antibiotics. Left untreated Lyme’s can cause permanent nerve damage. Because the symptoms can be vague and general in its early stages and not everyone gets or detects the distinctive “bulls eye” rash because it may be on an area of the body one would not readily seen, like at the back of the neck and or base of the hairline, doctors do not always test for it and people can suffer for quite a while before getting the correct diagnosis and proper treatment.
Now if you are suggesting that there are some people not diagnosed with Lyme’s claim they have it and then blame it for all sorts of unrelated generalized and perhaps psychosomatic illnesses and their mental problems and milk it for sympathy, you might have a point. OTOH, there have been people who have falsely claimed to have cancer, who have done the same thing, but that doesn’t make cancer any less real.
Fibromyalgia I don’t know much about to say one way or another. PTSD – in wars years ago it was often referred to as “shell shock” or “battle fatigue”.
My dad never wanted to talk a lot about it but when he came home near the end of WWII having served in the South Pacific and having been in a lot of battles; the last one on an island near the Philippines in which 2/3 of his infantry unit was killed on a single day including his CO, he described a time that lasted nearly a year that he couldn’t sleep and had horrific nightmares. When he came home his mother expected him to get a job right away and settle down and marry a nice girl and start a family but my dad would have no part of that. He described a time when and some of his GI friends would go into NYC and tear up the town, getting God’s own drunk, getting into fights and causing no end of trouble. This wasn’t typical behavior for my father before the war and it eventually stopped after meeting my mother. But to his dying day in 1997 he was still haunted by some of what he experienced during the war. He didn’t talk about it much, nor did he want to talk about all the metals for valor he had that my brother and I only found out about after he died, but sometimes he would talk about things that still haunted him – his best friend Pinty being mortally wounded by “friendly fire” and holding his hands over the gaping gushing wound in his friends chest while his friend cried out in prayer and called for his mother while a medic frantically and in vein tried to save him. Pinty died in my dad’s arms.
Another incident that haunted my dad was coming across Japanese officer in a building while on patrol in Manilla. My dad and his unit were going from building to building after the second battle of Manilla clearing out pockets of resistance and my dad heard a noise in another room, shouted out in both English and Japanese to “identify” and to come out and surrender and then saw the Japanese officer come through the doorway, his said not a word and his hands were not raised. My dad shot him on sight. As he was going through the dead man’s pockets, as he was instructed to do in case the officer had anything on him useful to turn over to US intelligence, my dad discovered the man was completely unarmed and when going through his wallet found some Catholic prayer cards, Rosary Beads and photographs of the man’s wife and young children.
My dad knew he did the right thing under the circumstance but never the less it haunted him for the rest of his life. The few times he talked about this and his friend Pinty, even more than 40 years later, he’d break down in tears like it had just happened yesterday.
My dad’s bullet and shrapnel wounds healed. But some of the emotional scars never healed completely.