stops<\/em> the course of life.<\/div>\nOutsiders see the persistence as the problem. "Holding on to your symptoms," "Stuck in the past," "Put it behind you," "Get over it," "Move on with your life," "Heal," "Let it go" – as if that’s good advice. But how do you do that when it’s the single most important determinate of your life? It’s the attempts at un·happening that cause so much of the problem. The traumatized person’s task is the opposite, how to live with an open wound that doesn’t, or can’t, heal. The afflicted often live their lives knowingly and unknowingly trying to prevent the past<\/em>, un·happening in the future what they couldn’t un·happen in the past. And all that unhelpful advice entreats them to skip the vital step of knowing in detail what actually happened and recognizing its indelible impact.<\/p>\nPresident Kaler and the people at the University of Minnesota aren’t getting the point. They want to skip an essential step in the same way, to look at policies for the future without acknowledging the truth of what happened in the past. For that matter, the pharmaceutical companies have the same idea, some version of reform that skips the step of acknowledging what is being reformed. The Minnesota Daily editorial staff says, "we should focus on avoiding potential tragedies and unethical behavior in the future.<\/em>" And they might as well add "by skipping the <\/em>tragedies and unethical behavior of the past<\/em>." Traumatized people aren’t wallowing in the past, they are insistent [and persistent] in establishing its reality, knowing, sometimes without knowing why, that it’s their only salvation [and ours]. It’s why we have memorials – Ground Zero, Kennedy’s flame, the Holocaust, Viet Nam, Gettysburg, Civil Rights. We can’t change the past, but we can honor it and make sure we know it happened.<\/p>\nIn a career of treating people with persistent traumatic illness, I never saw one successful case where there wasn’t some kind of memorial, public or private, some icon to assure that what happened was never forgotten. And in this last week, we saw footage of a dramatic version, a tribute to Nelson Mandela. One way he did the impossible in South Africa was his Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If the people who committed the atrocities of Apartheid came forward and admitted publicly what they had done, they were granted full amnesty. And if Mandela’s South Africa survives beyond him, that will likely have been an essential ingredient in why. <\/p>\n
A very bright doctor, Harold Wiltshire, visited the battlefield hospitals of World War I and observed that War Neurosis wasn’t seen in physically wounded soldiers. It was the
wound that didn’t show<\/em>. And there’s no moving on until it does. The same is true of what’s happened in Clinical Trials, and for that matter, Medicine as a whole under the corrupting influence of commercial interests. We all know the placemarkers that aren’t going to go away – Paxil Study 329, the Dan Markingson Case, the Bipolar Child, etc. The wounds have to show. They’re just too deep to ignore…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kaler on Faculty Senate resolution: "It’s not a review of the Markingson case" Fear and Loathing in Bioethics by Carl Elliot December 11, 2013 I think we’re getting a pretty good idea of where the University of Minnesota administration plans to take the "independent review" endorsed by the Faculty Senate last week. This interview with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42332"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42340,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42332\/revisions\/42340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}