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Comment by Eleison23 | Hacker News Reader

Haha, are you familiar with the way diagnosis is obtained for "mental disorders", such as bipolar disorder, ADHD, PTSD?

There are no clinical scans, blood tests, there is no way to rule out these conditions. They are not illnesses but they are clusters of symptoms that have been labeled so as to medicate or "treat" them without promising cures or healing.

Therefore all you need to do is convince a few psychiatric clinicians that your mental processes and behaviors are sufficiently non-standard and boom, you've got a mental illness that will never be cured, never be healed, and makes you a highly-valuable repeat customer up to and beyond the hour of your death.

And that's how you get 100% VA disability. Congratulations!

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I'm sure "Mental Disorders" was probably not meant to denigrate the giant chunk of humanity that does suffer from such disorders, especially not those in the military that are probably most at risk? Particularly because the US military is volunteer based and mostly recruits from disadvantaged citizens?

Also, if this is a legit shadow practice in the US military, the issue isn't people claiming disability, but our collective lack for caring for them.

> I'm sure "Mental Disorders" was probably not meant to denigrate the giant chunk of humanity that does suffer from such disorders

The suffering that they have is real, whether or not we debate the appropriateness or usefulness of the labels that have been placed on that suffering. Attempting to shame people for discussing those labels (even extremely negatively) as if the discussion itself damages the sufferers is darkly ironic, because the suppression of the discussion of that distress will result in a failure to improve the treatment of that distress.

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edit: I do understand the sentiment, but it's one that has long been cultivated through patients' groups that are founded and funded by pharmaceutical and other medical companies, and push the treatments that their funders push. Their funders are generally deeply invested in the status quo and cast objections to current received wisdom as attacks on the sick, unless they're trying to push a new drug, which is when they push change.

A patients' group can atrophy into an organization with no members, a single funding source, and a lawyer who spends an hour writing a press release every few months, and hires someone to update the website once a year.

I worked as a substitute teacher for a Asberger and Autism class. Half of them seemed to be there because they played Magic the Gathering. And the other half had obvious clinical difficulties with interactions.

I was quite perplexed by the width of severity of who was eligible for the class.

There was certainly a overprescription of needing to go in that class -- or maybe the diagnosis itself.

I really doubt it's that easy. These are professionals who have studied for thousands of hours. I don't doubt there are cases were someone who isn't actually ill slips through but I doubt it would be more then a few percent.

You're right, it's not that easy. I worked in the VA system for three years during residency, and it was relatively rare to see a veteran who was considered 100% service connected. I had a patient who was exposed to Agent Orange and later developed Hodgkin lymphoma, and while the cancer was treated successfully, the surgery and radiation left him with permanent disabilities that impaired his day to day life. Even he was not determined to be 100% service connected. (He came close - something like 80% if I remember correctly - but not 100%.)

I personally never saw someone who was determined to be 100% service connected purely for PTSD, but I am also not a psychiatrist so it's possible that there is a selection bias there.

And even if they did slip through at a higher rate. The answer wouldn't be to make it abitrarily harder to claim, because real people with real issues would inevitably be hurt.

If the system had 0% fraud rates, then it kind of implies that many real people have been denied because they failed to jump through the hoops.

These professionals are trained in the halls that brought us the biggest replication crisis ever.

And we have collected data on humanity for 20 years in Google and FB. If science goes were the data is, the true neuro-science/psychology today is proprietary and sold in chunks as a service to governments.

Might aswell ask Palantir directly about what humanity is really like without the grand illusions of a surplus of resources spend on postponing the eternal crisis that is our home.

No need to take Freuds last standing followers serious, just because they perpetuate a "Can-do-fix-all-things" illusion, we cling to while drowning in the things we can't fix.

lol, someone gets it.

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