Prudent people in other’s matters are not always prudent in their own. Nearly every medical disease, from cancer to retinitis pigmentosa, has advocacy groups that promote the study and treatment of that particular condition. However, until 2001, when the National Child Traumatic Stress Network was established by an act of Congress, there was no comprehensive organization dedicated to the research and treatment of traumatized children. The mental, biological, or moral development of traumatized children was not being systematically taught to child-are workers, to pediatricians, or in graduate schools of psychology or social work. Childhood trauma is radically different from traumatic stress in fully formed adults. Bill Harris had extensive experience with child-related legislation, and he went to work with Senator Kennedy’s staff to create a law. The bill establishing the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) was ushered through the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support and has more than 150 centers Worldwide. So, you see how Bill Harris and Senator Kennedy’s staff saw people in need of help and instead of slandering them, hurting them, or trying to terminate them, they formed a network to help others in need. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network is led by coordinating centers at Duke University and University of California Los Angeles, and the NCTSN includes universities, hospitals, tribal agencies, drug rehab programs, mental health clinics, and graduate schools.

Each of the sites, in turn, collaborates with local school systems, hospitals, welfare agencies, homeless shelters, juvenile justice programs, and domestic violence shelters, with a total of well over 8,300 affiliated partners. So, unlike these news agencies who pretend to care, but clearly have a maleficent agenda, the World is not a bad place, there are a lot of kind people reaching out to help those in need, so do not lose faith in humanity. Once up and running, the NCTSN had the means to assemble a clearer profile of traumatized kids in every part of the country. They led a survey that examined the records of nearly two thousand children and adolescents from agencies across the network. The vast majority of the children came from extremely dysfunctional families. More than half had been emotionally abused and/or had a caregiver who was too impaired to care for their needs. Almost 50 percent had temporarily lost caregivers to jail, service in the military, treatment programs, and had been looked after by strangers, foster parents, or distant relatives. About half of them reported witnessing domestic violence, and a quarter were also victims of sexual and/or physical abuse. There was no way to classify the wide-ranging symptoms of hundreds of thousands of returning Vietnam veterans. This forced clinicians to improvise the treatment of their patients and prevented them from being able to systematically study what approach actually worked. The adoption of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by the DSM III in 1980 led to extensive scientific studies and to the development of effective treatments, which turned out to be relevant not only to combat veterans but also to victims of a range of traumatic events, including rape, assault, and motor vehicle accidents.

Between 2007 and 2010 the Department of Defense spent more than $2.7 billion for treatment of and research on PTSD in combat veterans, while in fiscal year 2009 alone the Department of Veterans Affairs spent $24.5 million on in-house PTSD research. The DSM definition of PTSD is quite straightforward: A person is exposed to a horrendous event that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others, causing intense fear, helplessness, or horror, which results in a variety of manifestations: intrusive re-experiencing of the event (flashbacks, bad dreams, feeling as if the event were occurring), persistent and crippling avoidance (of people, places, thoughts, or feelings associated with the trauma, sometimes with amnesia for important part of it), and increased arousal (insomnia, hypervigilance, or irritability). This description suggests a clear story line: A person is suddenly and unexpectedly devastated by an atrocious event and is never the same again. The trauma may be over, but it keeps being played in continually recycling memories and in a reorganized nervous system. So why is the media in Sacramento engaged in torture and making life hard on the son of a veteran? All compulsion neurotics are superstitious in this manner and often against their better judgement. The neurotic’s guilty conscience is just as incomprehensible if traced to real misdeeds.

A compulsion neurotic may be oppressed by a sense of guilt which is appropriate to a wholesale murderer, while at the same time he acts towards his fellow beings in most considerate and scrupulous manner, a behavior which he evinced since his childhood. And yet his sense of guilt is justified: it is based upon intensive and frequent death wishes which unconsciously manifest themselves toward his fellow beings, in this case the son of a veteran. However, if we subject the aggressor(s) to psychoanalytic treatment, which makes his unconscious thoughts conscious to him he refuses to believe that thoughts are free and is always afraid to express evil wishes least they be fulfilled in consequences of his utterance. However, through this attitude as well as through the superstition which plays an active part in his life, he reveals to us how close he stands to the savage, who believes he can change the outer World by a mere thought of his. The primary obsessive actions of these neurotics are really altogether of a magical nature. If not magic, they are at least anti-magic and are destined to ward off the expectation of evil with which the neurosis is wont to being. Whenever I was able to pierce these secrets, it turned out that the content of this expectation of evil was death. The problem of death stands at the beginning of every philosophy; we have heard that the formation of the soul conception and of the belief in demons which characterize animism, are also traced back to the impressions which death makes upon man. Behold, all who are incensed against you shall be put to shame and confounded; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish.