Astral Codex Ten

VA

4 min read

VA

Article

VA is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 14, 2021 and July 23, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “besides the VA’s CBT-i Coach”; “the VA refused to fund studies because they couldn’t see what relevance PTSD might have for veterans”; “I thought I had left behind at the VA”. It most often appears alongside US, Afghanistan, America.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: May 14, 2021
  • Last seen: July 23, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On CBT-i Apps
May 14, 2021 · Original source
Several people in the comments pointed out existing lower-cost CBT-i apps! This was news to me - I'd searched pretty comprehensively and hadn't found any besides the VA's CBT-i Coach, which is not intended for individual use. They were:
Book Review: Crazy Like Us
July 15, 2021 · Original source
In fact, at the very beginning of the emergence of modern PTSD - around the Vietnam War - the original researchers of the condition called it “post-Vietnam syndrome” and tried to define it as a distinctly Vietnamese experience. The idea was that soldiers in past “good” wars had been fighting for something they believed in , had the support of the population back home, and didn’t have psychological problems. Since soldiers in Vietnam were developing all these new symptoms, that was yet more evidence that it was a “bad” war which had to be stopped. Over the course of decades (plus lots of marketing by enthusiastic therapists), PTSD expanded from a Vietnam-only problem, to all wars, to all natural disasters, to abuse and sexual violence, to the modern understanding where people say they got PTSD from a bad boss, a bad roommate, or an insufficiently woke college reading assignment. I enjoyed The Body Keeps The Score partly because it told the other side of this history, from one of the researchers involved in the popularization, who faced roadblocks like “the VA refused to fund studies because they couldn’t see what relevance PTSD might have for veterans”.
Inline links: The Body Keeps The Score
Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"
July 21, 2021 · Original source
(Dr. Van Der Kolk): "In my new job I was confronted on an almost daily basis with issues I thought I had left behind at the VA. My experience with combat veterans had so sensitized me to the impact of trauma that I now listened with a very different ear when depressed and anxious patients told me stories of molestation and family violence. I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of being sexually abused as children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women. Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital.
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
July 23, 2024 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.