As a calculated effort first designed to discredit our efforts in Vietnam, and to denigrate those who serve in the military as well, American print and popular media have overwhelmingly and consistently described veterans returning from conflict as being drug abusers, mentally unstable, and essentially unfit for reintegration into society. Now, Iraq vets are being described as having similarly high levels of mental disorder, and the cycle of misinformation is again being repeated.

The general theme at the moment is that up to thirty percent of Vietnam veterans suffered from mental disorders, and that returning Iraq veterans will suffer similar stress rates. It is interesting that almost nothing is said about veterans of the extremely successful operations in Afghanistan, with some suspecting that this is exactly because they have enjoyed such success in that operation. With the Iraq veterans, however, isolated incidents, such as a recent Massachusetts veteran becoming angry with rowdy partygoers, receive nationwide exposure, when factual investigation shows that such occurrences happen no more frequently than among the population at large, to include newspaper employees themselves. Such incidents are then widely publicized along with figures suggesting the thirty percent mental illness rate, and now a sixty percent rate of brain injury as well, in order to prove the case that returning vets are, indeed, mentally ill.

The reality, however, is quite different, and shows a surprising pattern of resilience that most people demonstrate, rather than victimization and mental illness after stress. The official publication of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychologist, has now reached a startling conclusion concerning all who undergo severe trauma: an astounding eighty-five percent of people actually show surprising and significant resilience, even when confronted with severe stress; stress which is similar in severity to combat. The higher thirty- and sixty percent figures of mental illness seem to result basically from three types of market forces which promote and publicize the higher figure.

First of all, there is what is known as a dumbing down of the definition of psychiatric disorder.

The author of the long-awaited National Comorbidity Study, a report which astoundingly asserted that a quarter of all adults in the United States – twenty-six percent – qualify as mentally ill, has now admitted that many people with mild and limited depressions grossly inflated this figure due to the low threshold required to be diagnosed as mentally ill. He used moving from one town to another as an example which would trigger symptoms severe enough to meet study criteria for illness. A similar phenomenon often happens to veterans when they endorse items on routine questionnaires, such as "Do you have repeated memories of a stressful military experience?", "Do you become upset when something reminds you of a stressful military experience?", et cetera. Some may endorse such an item if they recall being stressed by their drill instructor or by being six thousand miles away from home, stresses everyone routinely endures, but now, voilà!, they have earned a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Secondly, higher figures, such as these, result at least partly from aggressive diagnostic efforts that are often financially driven by those who benefit. Aggressive screening and internet websites, which advise vets on how to file for disability benefits and coach on the symptoms of PTSD, for example, can easily raise such diagnostic rates.

And thirdly, rates are artificially inflated as a result of just such fraud and dissimulation. As just reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry by Burkett and his colleagues, when records were vetted at a typical Veterans Affairs (VA/USDVA) PTSD clinic, only forty-one percent of the total sample had objective evidence of actual combat exposure. An astounding fifty-nine percent of these treatment-seeking Veterans Affairs patients were shown to have misrepresented their combat involvement in Vietnam, so much so that a massive review of disability cases is now being undertaken by the VA/USDVA.

In addition, with all the publicity about PTSD, it turns out that, of those veterans who, without question, and who absolutely suffered the worst trauma imaginable, through not just a single tour of duty, but through four or five, and up to seven years of the war, such as the surviving Vietnam Prisoners of War (POW), not a single veteran survivor of the Vietnamese prison camps currently receives any disability pension as a result of psychiatric disability.

A variant of the PTSD theme was sparked by a preliminary report by the Army News Service which suggested that among one hundred five severe neck and head casualties assessed between June and October of 2003, doctors discovered about two-thirds, or sixty-seven percent, to have brain injuries. This figure was immediately picked up by other news services, with inferences that life-saving Kevlar armor was contributing to undiagnosed brain injuries which would often show up later in life, be poorly identified or treated by the military or the VA, and which would cause disastrous results for the veterans and their families. This more than sixty percent figure was readily bandied about by the media.