“It’s Not the Fucking Swine Flu.”

Apparently, some people don’t think that hearing a few sad stories is a good reason to commit mass murder:

Since I was injured in a humvee I am especially susceptible on the road to the effects of my PTSD. I still get nervous and hold my breath every time I drive by a piece of trash or tire debris on the shoulder or median. I avoid guardrails and broken down cars on the side of the road. On a couple different occasions I yelled out “tire!” to warn my wife (who was driving) of a potential IED in the road. There was nothing there (no tire, no nothing).

One late night while driving home completely exhausted on our small two-lane country roads at slow speed I locked up all four tires on my car to keep from hitting a cardboard box in the middle of the road. At that moment I would have bet the contents of my bank account it was an IED. That’s what fucking PTSD is like. At no point in time have I ever felt the desire or need to grab a weapon and go shoot someone or something up. At no point in time have I ever grabbed a weapon and broken a law because I felt the need to protect myself. PTSD urges you mitigate the risk of events that happened in your life.

But if you’ve never had anything traumatic happen in your life, you can’t fucking have PTSD.

If you can get PTSD from treating soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center then why the hell haven’t more people snapped? Why haven’t all the therapists in physical therapy and occupational therapy, and all the staff on Ward 57 ran around shooting up the place? They have seen far more wounded soldiers than this piece of shit ever did. My occupational and physical therapists, like many of the civilian personnel at Walter Reed, have been there since the beginning of OEF. They have taken care of countless (probably hundreds) [of s]oldiers with a variety of different injuries. Missing arms (like me). Missing legs. Missing both. Missing parts of the face. Severe burns. Whole chunks of the skull missing. Missing jaws. Ears. Eyes. Severe PTSD. Severe TBI (traumatic brain injury) to the point that Soldiers would forget where they were going while walking the 50 feet from physical therapy to occupational therapy (they would be found wandering the halls unsure where they were supposed to be going. I had a buddy who used to do that walking the 20 feet to prosthetics. My TBI is bad, but not that bad).

So why haven’t they gone crazy? Because you don’t get PTSD from sitting on your ass around Walter Reed. Not only is it not possible to “catch” secondhand PTSD, but it is not that kind of a place. I would know, I was a patient there for nine months. The place is simply not that stressful or chaotic. When I was there my PTSD got better, not worse. And I would be willing to bet my dog tags that I saw far more wounded Soldiers than shit bag major did during our overlapping time there in 2007. I regularly visited Ward 57 to give advice to the new wounded. Other Soldiers and amputees did it for me when I was there so I considered my visits “paying it forward”. I had daily physical and occupational therapy. I regularly partook in activities in and out of Walter Reed with present and past wounded Soldiers. To say that this guy got PTSD from being stationed at Walter Reed is an absolute fucking farce. The people who are making this shit up have never set foot on Walter Reed, let alone met a soldier with PTSD.

In order to actually have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you have to go through some sort of traumatic event(s) to have “post stress.” Can therapists be emotionally troubled by the things they hear from patients? Yes. But you cannot catch PTSD from someone. It’s not the fucking swine flu.

Yeah. Every time I hear PTSD in relation to the Ft. Hood shootings I want to pop somebody. It is a huge insult to our brave wounded warriors to compare what they have gone through to the maneuverings in this sick guy’s mind. A reminder: this man would not allow his picture to be taken with a female in the frame. Is that normal Muslim behavior? No; it is not.

Can we stop blaming the victims, here? And can we fix the blind spot in the U.S. Army that equates radical Islam with mainstream Islam?

h/t: Hot Air