Author: amazonite345

PTSD Claims

We await the results of the 20-year, 10,000-family-strong study of impacts on Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ kin, the largest of its kind ever conducted, that just got under way.

This sentence claims that such a study is being made despite not citing any source like she does for other claims. There is also an indirect claim that this one large study will somehow be more credible than many smaller studies whose additive value is much higher than this one alone.

Meanwhile, René Robi­chaux, social-work programs manager for US Army Medical Command, concedes that “in a family system, every member of that system is going to be impacted, most often in a negative way, by mental-health issues.”

By mentioning the US Army Medical Command, the author is claiming that the military is fully aware of generational PTSD. There is also a claim that every member of a family with one person with PTSD is going to be impacted. The wording “most often in a negative way” also makes an interesting claim in that some families might be impacted in a neutral or positive way.

That was the impetus for the Marriage and Family Therapy Program, which since 2005 has added 70 therapists to military installations around the country. Mostly what the program provides is couples’ counseling.

Implicitly, it could be argued that her mentioning of adding 70 therapists since 2005 is her way of arguing that we are not doing enough. Taking into account the overwhelming numbers she throws at us earlier in the article, the number 70 seems to be too little for too many. Explicitly, she is claiming that these therapists are a very positive step in the right direction.  She also claims that the biggest issue facing veterans with PTSD is marriage problems: hence the fact most of the program is geared toward that.

Children are “usually not” treated, but when necessary referred to child psychiatrists—of which the Army has 31.

The quotation marks as well as the dishearteningly low number of 31 implicitly claims that barely anything, if anything is being done for children with a parent who has PTSD.

Meanwhile, the Child, Adolescent and Family Behavioral Health Office has trained hundreds of counselors in schools with Army children in and around bases to try to identify and treat coping and behavioral problems early on. “We’re better than we were,” Robi­chaux says. “But we still have a ways to go.”

Immediately after claiming nothing was being done, the author reverses course and claims that there are now hundreds of counselors who may end up treating a large amount of kids, depending on how many Army children go to that particular school. In her last sentence, she pushes forth the claim that there is still a lot to learn, and leaves the reader with the feeling of cautious optimism that she has been throughout the article.

Stone Money—amazonite345

To many people, money is the most solid, most definitive proof they have of well-being. To have a lot of money is never wrong – to be low on money is very wrong. But the very concept of money is a dynamic one.  It’s a dynamic concept that is built, very basically, on a sort of honor system. Yes, money has no value other than the value we all says it does.  Historically, money was invented as a way to make exchanging goods easier. Money started off as gold, but when gold became too heavy for larger quantities and too scarce for higher demand, we started using paper. Each paper stated its equivalent worth in gold. Eventually, paper became fully independent, and gold was removed entirely from the equation: the value of the paper was based off what the government said. And when paper became too heavy, we made money digitized. Now people have even less solid proof that there is money at all; the banks say we have the money, so we have the money. Is there any backing that the dollar our bank says we have is actually worth a dollar? None really, except for the reassurances of the government. What ever step comes next, no one knows for sure but any new step only increases how arbitrary the concept of our money is. However, as long as the government, and society continues to say that our money is worth something, it will continue to be worth something.