Psychiatry is not rocket science. It’s much much much more difficult. Impossible for little brains like yourself to understand. I myself am obviously much too thick to understand. You see, I read blogs and I’ve read literally hundreds of stories from women who suffered depression and felt awful about their abortion.
But you see we only think these women are suffering. A number of psychiatrists from the American Psychiatric Association have informed us otherwise. The Psychiatric Times reports: that there’s no such thing as women suffering after they’d had an abortion.
Abortion trauma syndrome is a fabricated mental disorder conceived by anti-abortion activists to advance their cause and is not a scientifically based psychiatric disorder. So said two psychiatrists at the American Psychiatric Association’s recent annual meeting in San Francisco.
“Abortion does not cause psychiatric damage, but the claim that it does is a prime strategy of the anti-abortion movement, which has convinced many people in the US,” said former APA president Nada Stotland, MD, MPH…
For instance, the Elliot Institute, founded by David C. Reardon, PhD, claims that women who have abortions are prone to abortion trauma syndrome and are at increased risk for substance abuse, clinical depression, sleep disorders, and suicide and that their children are prone to behavioral problems.
Countering those assertions is the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Mental Health and Abortion, which recently collected, examined, and summarized the most current scientific research on mental health and abortion. The task force’s 2008 report concluded that “among women who have a single, legal, first-trimester abortion of an unplanned pregnancy for nontherapeutic reasons, the relative risks of mental health problems are no greater than the risks among women who deliver an unplanned pregnancy.”
When bills were introduced in the legislature asserting that abortions cause significant and long-lasting psychological damage, Stotland testified that such allegations are contrary to scientific evidence. In her 2004 testimony before a House Subcommittee on Health, which looked at postpregnancy mental health in women, she told members, “Abortion trauma syndrome does not exist in the psychiatric literature and is not recognized as a psychiatric diagnosis.”
So there’s no trauma related to abortion? OK. Well probably psychiatrists have a very high bar before they call something a disease and it finds placement in the DSM, which is essentially the encyclopedia of mental illness.
So I decided to look at some of the awful illnesses that did make the cut.
Harper’s Magazine reported:
According to the DSM-IV, something called frotteurism (302.89) is the irresistible desire to sexually touch and rub against one’s fellow passengers on mass transit. Something called fugue (300.13) consists of travel in foreign lands, often under an assumed identity…
Are these really mental illnesses? Really? Couldn’t it just be some creep on the bus?
And traveling in foreign lands under an assumed name is really a mental illness? Couldn’t there be a very logical explanation for it…like…you got caught rubbing up against some chick on a bus and she called the cops so you had to skedaddle to Mexico under a different name. It seems to me that traveling to a foreign land under an assumed name is hardly a sign of mental illness but perfectly logical in that case.
But the question remains – do the number of occurrences of fugue really dwarf the number of women depressed over killing their own child?
But it gets even crazier. Harper’s reports:
Current among the many symptoms of the deranged mind are bad writing (315.2, and its associated symptom, poor handwriting); coffee drinking, including coffee nerves (305.90), bad coffee nerves (292.89), inability to sleep after drinking too much coffee (292.89), and something that probably has something to do with coffee, though the therapist can’t put his finger on it (292.9); shyness (299.80), also known as Asperger’s Disorder); sleepwalking (307.46); jet lag (307.45); snobbery (301.7, a subset of Antisocial Personality Disorder); and insomnia (307.42); to say nothing of tobacco smoking, which includes both getting hooked (305.10) and going cold turkey (292.0). You were out of your mind the last time you have a nightmare (307.47). Clumsiness is now a mental illness (315.4). So is playing video games (Malingering, V65.2).
So clumsiness should be treated but a woman who is sorry she had an abortion should be ignored.
Aren’t these guys brilliant? I just thank goodness they’re not using their expansive intellects to politicize psychiatry.
August 26, 2009 at 2:44 am
There is the PROPENSITY for trauma on two levels: physical and psychological. Some women abort spontaneously (i.e. the body causing it) and never know they were even pregnant, so in these cases there is no trauma to speak of. When it comes to induced abortion, obviously there is the risk of trauma to the cervix, the ovaries and surrounding tissues. This is just basic human physiology 101, regardless of how sterile and proceduristic the doctors make it sound. There is always the risk of physical trauma. The propensity for psychological trauma is also there if the woman has any remorse for her decision. If there is absolutely no remorse, then there is no real trauma for the procedure itself.
So, to say there is no "trauma" period is just anti-scientific and bad medicine as it were.
August 26, 2009 at 4:37 am
Ah, the good ol' DSM. Homosexuals lobbied to have Homosexuality removed from the DSM and they succeeded. I don't expect that Post-Abortive Syndrome will ever make it in, even when the research conclusively "proves" that it exists. An organization like the APA which allows lobbyists to determine what is a disorder and what is not will not be swayed by research that goes against its agenda.
August 26, 2009 at 11:02 am
Why not hear the women themselves?
http://divine-ripples.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html#1942918704246367914
(The abortion industry & the politicians & others who support them all lie – just like the father of all lies.)
August 26, 2009 at 2:10 pm
The good news, of course, is that secular psychiatrists will not actually be treating women with post-abortion trauma.
August 26, 2009 at 2:15 pm
I guess the psychological/psychiatric community has to keep up its denial least they have to admit what abortion truly is. Dr, Theresa Burke, the founder of Rachel's Vineyard Ministries, met up with this type of denial early in her career as well as before.
As for myself, I agree with Rick, these people need to listen to those of us who have made this horrible decision as to what kinds of trauma this "choice" causes.
Thanks for sharing this.
August 26, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Just some personal experience in my own family: my Mom aborted 2 children before she married my father and had my twin sisters and me. I think the survivors guilt we experienced growing up (the "I have to prove worth in my existence by being perfect at everything- sports, beauty, academics) pressured my sister into the depression and anorexia she still suffers. Her twin battled depression on and off and has image problems related to her weight as well. I myself have been through some depression and risky behavior in my teen and college years as well.
Whether or not it's all related and all my Mom's fault, the jury's still out. However, after studying literature out there on the affects of abortion on the surviving children, I saw a lot of similarities in the experiences of my childhood and the ideology of my mother. So, yes, I believe that a mental trauma occured to put my Mom in the state of denial and vehement attack on anything that threatens her right to abort my siblings. It's been hard for me to forgive, but I have. Abortion just breaks my heart- I would gladly save any woman from experiencing what my Mom went through and what we as children were subject to.
Pray for her- she's still in a deep denial about the gravity of her choices.
August 26, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Crud, my granny lost two babies (after three successful pregnancies*), first trimester, and it made such an impact on her that she had what we'd now call post-partum depression so bad they wouldn't leave her alone with the next two kids.
And they want us to believe that folks who make what they're always talking about as a "horribly tough choice" never have regrets, never change their minds on the reality of the situation, are never scared into something they think is wrong?
I'd say "give me some of what they're smoking" but it might mark the baby….. -.-
* the urge to refer to my uncles as "still-living pregnancies" is strong in my snark-urge, since those folks talk about aborting 'pregnancies.'
August 26, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Sarah, that is a really gut wrenching story. Thanks for sharing, and God bless.
August 26, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Fr. Gearhart wrote:
The good news, of course, is that secular psychiatrists will not actually be treating women with post-abortion trauma.
That, I have to admit, is an extremely compelling point!
August 26, 2009 at 7:45 pm
I speak from experience that they know not what they discuss. Even Obama said that abortion is a gut wrenching choice. Why? What about it makes it so hard? Compare abortion to having gallbladder surgery… if your gallbladder was inflamed and about to explode, would that be a gut wrenching choice to have surgery? No. But abortion? Why is that such a hard choice? Only the pro-abortion idiots want to sugar coat what abortion truly is and why it effects women so badly.
And I suffered from Post-Abortion Stress Disorder for 10 years. Trust me, it exists.
August 26, 2009 at 7:46 pm
*bow*
Thank you for speaking out.
August 26, 2009 at 8:21 pm
payoffs from Naral, the psys at DSM got huge payoffs, that's how homosexuality got dropped too
remember money talks
and when that doesn't blackmail does
August 26, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Hey,
Remember when Asthma was psychological?
And women who had that whole PTSD thing after being raped needed to just "get over it" because "they wanted it anyways"?
And those soldiers with those flashbacks were just faking it and needed to "man up"?
And when women who had an abortion and killed their own child and were bothered by it were not really bothered by it at all and killing your own child caused no psychological distress at all?
Yeah good times, good times.
August 27, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I guess one COULD make the argument that the after-effects of abortion are really more SPIRITUAL than PSYCHOLOGICAL — I mean, is guilt and despair really a mental illness when it's caused by your own choices? And since the APA apparently doesn't believe that the spirtual world exists….
It's like people I know who are depressed–for some, it;s a mental illness–a brain chemical imbalance that can be fixed with drugs.
For others? They've left the church, are living in a state of mortal sin, and have totally and deliberately cut themselves off from any relationship with God — their depression is NOT a mental illness– it's a spiritual sickness because they refuse to acknowledge why they're HERE.
So medication doesn't help them, because, honestly, they SHOULD be depressed–it's not chemistry, it's theology!
I could see how post-abortion syndrome could really be classified as a spiritual, rather than mental problem. It's not that these moms' brains are misfiring– it's that they are acting exactly as they SHOULD. (cf. Medea, Agamemnon, and other Greek tragedies that center on what happens after a parent kills a child…)
August 28, 2009 at 2:52 am
http://festungarnulfinger.blogspot.com/2005/02/there-is-no-love-in-hell.html