Clearly anticipating that PTSD will be difficult if not impossible to keep out of the public debate, the Bush administration and its domestic allies are attempting to preempt the issue using arguments that masquerade as science to obfuscate or deny credible scientific evidence. They are creating what New York Times editorial writer Paul Krugman has described as "a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of 'scholars' whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers." American Enterprise scholar and administration apologist Sally Satel, for example, blames psychiatrists for over-diagnosing PTSD and veterans for allowing themselves to be seduced into believing they are really sick. According to Satel, whose articles and opinion pieces have been published in newspapers all over the U.S., there's nothing wrong with the vets that the distraction of a good job wouldn't cure. Unfortunately, she would have us believe, the lazy bums have instead been handed the perfect excuse to just lie back and collect benefits. It's the diagnosis that is ruining lives, and not the horror of warfare.
Satel's most recent attack accuses Vietnam vets, who are approaching retirement age, of using PTSD claims to cushion their retirement funds. She is quite right in claiming that the vast majority of veterans receiving disability compensation for PTSD in the past few years have been Vietnam veterans. Once again, she is trying to drum up suspicion of veteran fraud. The veterans, however, attribute the renewal of their symptoms to the daily onslaught of horrific images and stories coming out of Iraq. Max Cleland, for example, the former senator from Georgia and a triple amputee from the war Vietnam, has recently gone back into therapy at Walter Reed for PTSD that has flared up anew. Cleland says , since this new war began, "I don't read a newspaper. I don't watch television. It's all a trigger. . . . This war has triggered me, and it has triggered Vietnam veterans all over America." John P. Wilson, who has extensively researched Vietnam veterans at Cleveland State University, said 57 percent reported flashbacks after watching reports about the war on television, and almost 46 percent said their sleep was disrupted. Nearly 44 percent said they had fallen into a depression since the war began, and nearly 30 percent said they had sought counseling since combat started in Iraq. "Clearly the current Iraq war, and their exposure to it, created significantly increased distress for them," said Wilson, who has done extensive research on Vietnam veterans since the 1970s. "We found very high levels of intensification of their symptoms. . . . It's like a fever that has gone from 99 to 104."
Compounding the image Satel has drawn of an opportunistic cabal of psychiatrists and veterans using PTSD diagnoses to defraud the public, the VA decided in August 2005 to review the cases of over 72,000 veterans who have already been awarded the maximum disability compensation for PTSD. That means that those veterans with the most serious mental problems will have to prove their case all over again. Aside from the injustice of choosing to reevaluate only those cases where veterans received 100 percent disability and not cases where they were either awarded inappropriately low ratings or unfairly denied disability altogether, the VA's pursuit of the most vulnerable vets with PTSD and the high-decibel accusations of potential fraud promote the stigma attached to mental trauma. "There is flat-out discrimination against PTSD on the part of many people, both in the military and [in] the VA," says Rick Weidman, director of government relations at Vietnam Veterans of America. He calls the VA review "a biased and bigoted view of neuropsychiatric wounds." Once again, it is the vets who have been made ill by their combat experiences who are being denounced and disavowed, and the timing sends a menacing message to those soldiers who are now in or hoping to return from Iraq and Afghanistan. Though military psychiatrists agree that the sooner a traumatized soldier asks for and receives appropriate help, the more likely it is that their symptoms can be managed—not cured, mind you, managed. According to the Army's own mental health advisory team, 50% of the soldiers in Iraq are afraid to ask for help if they are having any kind of stress reaction because they believe they will face ridicule, or persecution, or even an end to their military careers.