A double-amputee veteran has taken exception to the notion — and accompanying study — that some millennials are suffering from PTSD because Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 presidential election.
Joey Jones addressed the idea head-on during Wednesday’s “Fox & Friends.”
What did he say?
Jones, a retired U.S. Marine Corps bomb tech, appeared during a Wednesday segment on the Fox News show to discuss the findings of the recent study as well as PTSD at large.
“First of all,” Jones began, “[PTSD] isn’t a negative thing; it’s something that a lot of men and women suffer from because they were put into a traumatic experience, but when we really start to pull back the layers on these thousands of military service members who were diagnosed with PTSD, what we learned is that it’s a dramatic and it’s a blatant misnomer across the board.”
The vet went on to note that many service members who have PTSD have had traumas in their past, and the horror of war only exacerbates that in some cases.
“When you pull back the layers on the onion, these men and women had traumas as a child: They had a divorce, they had things that happened in their social lives with the people they care about before they ever went to war,” he explained. “What happens is war kind of rips that scab off, and it revealed these things. We have a lot of people diagnosed with PTSD that never went to war.”
Jones explained that it hardly seems appropriate for people who have never served in combat zones to appropriate the diagnosis of PTSD simply because they don’t like something they’re seeing or hearing.
“What I’m getting at is that this misdiagnosis, that ‘Let me take that banner [of PTSD] and put it on my life,’ it’s creeping into our civilian lives as well,” he said. “And so you know have people claiming to have [PTSD] because they feel discomfort and uncertainty.”
“Let me tell you something,” he continued. “What these people felt might be a self-imposed stress disorder, but it’s the equivalent to a bad hair day. It’s not the equivalent to putting your buddy into a bag, it’s not the equivalent to trying to save someone’s life and watching it slip away in the middle of combat.”
Jones went on to blast the appropriation as “disgusting” and offensive to those who clinically suffer from PTSD, and specifically those who have served their country.
“We don’t understand what the mind goes through in combat yet; we think we do, the pendulum’s just swung in a different direction, so now we blanket this disorder when it fact it’s much deeper than that and to have someone dishonor and really take a shot at those men and women who are suffering because they don’t enjoy Trump’s rhetoric, it’s really kind of disgusting,” he said.
Jones concluded with a stark message to those who haven’t served their country during times of war.
“You can take your studies, your degrees, your entitled opinions, and claim whatever you would like,” he said. “What this country needs is men and women of strong mind and strong faith. That’s who serves this country. Unfortunately, those are the people who truly have suffered from PTSD but thankfully, they’re strong enough and we believe in them enough that we’ll get them through it.”
“Men and women recover daily from disorders of post-traumatic stress, and simply being upset over an election doesn’t rate something like that,” Jones concluded.
What’s a brief background?
A survey of Arizona State University students showed that 25 percent of respondents reported PTSD symptoms because President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.
“What we were interested in seeing was, did the election for some people constitute a traumatic experience?” said lead researcher Melissa Hagan of San Francisco State University.
Students were surveyed in January and February 2017, and answered questions about their feelings and physical manifestations of said feelings following Trump’s election.
The survey reported that one out of every four people surveyed “met criteria for clinically significant symptoms related to the election.”
Women, Democrats, minorities, and non-Christians reported much higher levels of stress in the study.
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