I suppose what I have been discovering through my current research and study project about Latin American history and collective trauma is what a universal and all-pervasive experience trauma is for the human condition. Our whole history and experience as a species has been so marked by violence and struggle and disaster that we are indeed a seething collective mass of psychological damage. The distinctions that are used to define PTSD and other mental disorders are so narrow, so subtle and so similar to the normative human experience that I have really come to wonder if what we call mental illness is often little more than an attempt at isolating and pathologizing populations of persons for simply deviating from the norm.
I only wish it was that simple.
Right now, PTSD is considered the exclusive property of soldiers who've seen action and first responders, and maybe prisoners. It is also brought on by childhood abuse, acts of God, acts of random human violence, systemic racism, homophobia, poor-bashing and any other kind of prolonged mistreatment of minorities by majorities that don't like them very much.
Generally life is full of people mistreating others, usually the strong against the weak and vulnerable. The trauma also impacts the bullies, simply by further dehumanizing them. By reinforcing in themselves and each other that it is okay to be cruel to certain classes of people, they are losing out on the opportunity of learning empathy. Without empathy we are not truly human.
I have noticed that people who have survived trauma and mistreatment are actually not less, but more fully human than their oppressors. As much as suffering debilitates us it also forms us and can transform us into caring and compassionate humans. Wealthy and powerful people generally do not have those qualities. They are very good at administering, controlling, dominating, competing, exploiting others, and winning, and to my knowledge none of those traits do one single thing to foster and facilitate compassion and empathy.
The problem with those who become ill from stress and trauma is that by the time they are in the hands of the public mental health services they are often so damaged and debilitated that the lack of resources often leaves them unrecovered and still suffering, if well-medicated.
I believe in some ways my diagnosis of PTSD to be bogus. If I wasn't poor and unemployed at the time I might well have escaped the diagnosis altogether. PTSD, for example, did not make me unemployed. I was up against a very unsympathetic employment and economic system that were almost impossible for me to access. I and many other workers my age had become basically obsolete, thanks to the glorious new economy.
Unemployment and a welfare system increasingly nasty and brutalizing made homelessness inevitable. PTSD did not make me homeless.
When I finally found housing I was emotionally exhausted and needed further time to rest, despite a social assistance program designed to be sadistic and punitive. I fought the bastards and became stronger.
I am not saying that I wasn't affected by trauma. Of course I was. But the medical and mental health systems overplayed their hand in convincing me that I was ill, rather than accepting that I was simply exhausted and in need of rest and recovery. Thank God I didn't have to take any medications for my alleged condition or this would have totally pathologized me, in my own eyes and in the eyes of others, and I would still be perceiving my life through the lens of a fake mental illness. I would have disempowered myself by default of believing in myself and my ability to get better.
The only difference between the mentally ill and the mentally well is in the diagnosis. There exist in this world two types of human being: the diagnosed and the undiagnosed.
This isn't to say that there aren't those who are particularly disabled from mental health issues. Rather, in the vast majority of cases, had steps, interventions, and especially loving and pragmatic networks of support, been already in place for all of us earlier on, I don't think that our mental health system would now look quite the way it does now.
But right now, we are all collectively traumatized, and this madness of greed, war, competition and selfishness that has engulfed our society is only making us all the sicker, and we do have a collective responsibility to resist this insanity of greed and socially-legitimized narcissism, work on taking better care of one another, and perhaps then we'll see some improvement in things.
Until that day arrives, I don't have a lot of hope.
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