My poem allows for people who are so psychologically crippled they need something. Therapy can’t hurt. But for the other 90%, therapy is just another recreational drug. I have nothing against recreational drugs.

I was in Vietnam and later diagnosed with PTSD. PTSD didn’t exist yet when I got home. I have never had any therapy that made much difference. Time works. It fades as time passes.

In combat you learn a special set of skills that don’t fit back in the “real” world. How you fit back in is deeply personal. It’s your character that was altered, not your state of mind. Character resists the therapeutic mindset.

The only good analysis I have ever read about (what is now called) PTSD is Dr Jonathan Shay’s Achillies In Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. He spent twenty years doing group therapy with Vietnam veterans. He gets it.