Rob Henderson quoting from Outraged:Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground
"PTSD rates are higher in affluent countries than in countries that face higher rates of adversity and violence; for instance, the PTSD rate is 6 times higher in Canada than Mexico...the better things get, the more sensitive we become."
I don't know that I would focus on sensitive, which has a wuss connotation. There is a related concept of what our expectations are, and this comes nearer the mark. Most boys of my generation were assaulted by other boys. Even if you usually won your fights someone could always take you by surprise or even sucker punch you, not to mentions rocks, sticks and other weapons. Yet if you asked most of us today whether we were assaulted as boys we might say no, unless there was some standout incident of a boy much older or escalating to weapons.
The better life around you gets, the more you have an expectation of fairness, justice, and peace.
Son #5, a nephew of ours, came to us because his parents kept dropping him off at each other's houses refusing to take him, including on a porch in February with only a light jacket. Son #3, who is from a Romanian orphanage, was with us when we took him to a restaurant the second night he was with us. When the youngest son went off to the bathroom, John-Adrian shook his head. "I can't believe that. This is terrible. That should never happen to a kid." When he kept going on, amazed, I was amazed. "John-Adrian! It happened to you!" He was taken aback, thought a moment. "Well," he finally said "It should never happen in America."
2 comments:
More common in Canada, or Canadians have more money to get therapy & a diagnosis? I don't think kids know they're growing up in a rich country. I also think if everyone around you grows up with PTSD, it's just normal life.
Yeah, Tom has a point. Thailand did a program maybe twenty years back to fund a lot more psychologists to serve rural communities; the result was that diagnoses skyrocketed. Life didn’t get worse in rural Thailand; it’s just there was nobody to notice before.
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