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They really are snowflakes, aren’t they?

1 in 4 Students Left With PTSD Symptoms After Trump’s Win, Study Shows

31 thoughts on “They really are snowflakes, aren’t they?”

  1. No, they probably really do believe they’ve been traumatized and are badly stressed as a result.

    Because, obviously, they have never suffered real trauma

  2. This is what you get when everyone’s a winner, nobody ever fails and everyone has their ‘self esteem’ boosted to the stratosphere – the most self centred, egotistical and solipsistic generation ever.

    Sensible folk said the above would cause trouble but were shouted down by the usual suspects, and look who was right…..

  3. @jim

    Read an interesting article along those lines. everyone is special. everyone is told they are special. So they can’t cope when life doesn’t treat them in the way special people should be treated.

    And for so many below the age of 35 their growing up experience was the 90s and 00s when the economy was doing well. That’s their expectation. 2008 was a shock to them. If you were born in the 60s you’d seen plenty of recessions. They happen. You get on with it. And your parents remembered being bombed. Which was more traumatic than having slow broadband.

  4. PTSD is a real thing amongst soldiers. But not a high percentage. Most of whom haven’t had to do “trauma”. Me included in that, btw.

    And it is really amenable to early treatment – such as being treated seriously by your usual social circle. It’s worst when people are separated from that and treated in, say, a medical situation with competence and professional coolness.

    Now, how do you think these students are treated? With disbelief? Disdain? Calm professional assessment of their complete lack of trauma?

    PTSD, egregious narcissism. Not the same thing.

  5. Bloke in North Dorset

    “PTSD is barely even a real thing among soldiers”

    Absolute bollocks. There’s quite a few real soldiers talk about it in this podcast series . Epsisode 4 is particularly enlightening as he talks to Dr Walter Busuttil who is a world authority on the subject and has worked with a lot of vitims, including one who started suffering in his ’90s. Combat Stress have a few tales to tel as well.

    As to these snowflakes:
    WW1
    WW2
    Korea
    Falklands
    NI
    Iraq
    Afghanistan
    Trump

    Yep, I can see the link there.

    “Read an interesting article along those lines. everyone is special. everyone is told they are special. So they can’t cope when life doesn’t treat them in the way special people should be treated.”

    I think there’s something in that and although its been round for a while it seems to have been magnified recently. Here’s an interesting discussion on The Coddling of the American Mind with co-author Greg Lukianof.f

  6. Actually, this probably says more about the academics who produced the study than it does about the young adults that were studied.

  7. Comment from my late father (ex-8th Army, anti-tank gunner) and father-in-law (ex-Japanese PoW): by modern standards, most of the population of Europe and Asia should have been classified as suffering from PTSD by 1945. Oddly, they mostly managed.

  8. Quite a few soldiers talking about something doesn’t mean much. Soldiers will talk about anything. We’re human beings – we walked out of Africa and fucked off every wild beast and nomadic tribe of Neanderthals on the way. We are built out of trauma.

  9. SE knows what he is talking about.
    Also PTSD was discovered during WWI among soldiers: only it was called “Shell Shock” because they didn’t use long words for simple things in those days.
    The difference between seeing your mates literally blown to pieces a few feet away (in some cases having bits of them spashed over you) and the election result bringing someone you don’t like is mind-bogglingly wide.

  10. My ex-wife survived the Chinese Cultural Revolution, escaping with her family in a rowing boat at dead of night her father rowing 50-odd miles to Hong Kong.

  11. Our ancestors survived wars, famine anddisease long enough to successfully reproduce. What are the odds real stress is good for you and that lack of exposure leads to victim idiocy. (Similar to overclean environments resulting in overactive immune systems and allergies)

  12. I mentioned above that article I read. It starts by looking at the Pixar film The Incredibles as having a subversive swipe at modernity and the ‘everyone is special’ meme, then goes on…

    “There are a lot of young people today who are absolutely frustrated with their lives, and it is all because they were fed this idea that they were special. Right now, there are a good amount of young people flipping hamburgers at McDonalds, and I applaud them for it. Flipping burgers is NOT a bad thing at all. But in their eyes it is a bad thing. Why? They were taught that they were special, and special people do not flip hamburgers. These young people are going out into the real world, thinking that they are going to be that special person who is going to change it once and for all, and then suddenly realizing that the world does not really care about their opinions or ideas, and that instead of suddenly being placed above the pack, they have to work their way up. As I said, there is nothing wrong with working a entry level job, but to those who have been told that they were special, it is a tough pill to swallow….
    …Not everyone is special, understand, everyone is important, everyone is valid, and everyone is even significant, but not everyone is special. A person is not special just because they have been told all their life that they are special”

    Maybe we’re just a bunch of old people moaning about young people. But the above strikes a chord with me.

    (Incidentally, for those with time on their hands, The Incredibles has generated a lot of Ayn Rand discussions. If you like that sort of read)

  13. Yesterday there was an op-ed in The Times that claimed today’s youth faced greater uncertainty than any generation since 1945. I had to point out that I was at school during the Cuban Missile crisis, when uncertainty ran to whether at any moment you might spot a bright light and a mushroom cloud on the horizon. But I’m sure Brexit trumps all that.

  14. An interesting PTSD observation. One of the odd already where it started to show up was in air combat missions in the Balkans. These were largely “turkey shoots” – no opposing aircraft and anti-aircraft systems that were well below the technology level of the NATO (? may have been EU) air forces.

    So why? The anecdata that got to me was that they were flying out of the usual base in Italy. So breakfast with family, in to work, fly off to war, possibly kill people, back to base, debrief, dinner with family. Rinse & repeat. It was the dichotomy between the war and the normal existence that was causing the stress, which, in a few susceptible or otherwise unusual cases, manifested as PTSD.

    The US (?) General in charge restricted the air crew to base, let them let off steam in the Officers’ Mess, and, by and large, it disappeared.

    Also, the British military have had senior NCOs and mid-rank officers trained up as mental health first responders. It’s back to the being treated seriously by your peers thing I mentioned above. It seems to have worked significantly if we looked at the differences in the number of mental health discharges from service recently (mostly Afg) compared to NI, Falklands, GW1 & 2.

  15. ” I had to point out that I was at school during the Cuban Missile crisis, when uncertainty ran to whether at any moment you might spot a bright light and a mushroom cloud on the horizon.”

    Similarly growing in the 70s and 80s I was convinced that there at some point we were all going to be vapourised in a MAD end of the world situation, that or over run by the Russians.

    Plus the IRA were blowing people up on the streets and pubs of the UK, terrorists were hijacking planes left right and centre, everything in the UK stopped working all the time because someone or other was on strike, and there were 3m unemployed as well, so getting a job when you left school didn’t seem that likely either. Apart from all that the future looked just peachy………

  16. @ Jim
    As a young working adult in the 1970s subject to pay restraint in a period of high (arguably hyper-) inflation I was worried about the present more than the future

  17. ‘… , evaluated 769 students at Arizona State University studying psychology…’

    Psychology students: so they have a head start.

  18. @Jim, October 25, 2018 at 10:21 am

    I grew up in NI in 60s/70s – bombs, bullets & guns – next door father of three under tens (a judge [RC]) murdered by ira

  19. @ Pcar
    I’m not remotely comparable and do not wish to pretend that I am.
    We thought IRA was Evil (it took some time before we learned that the quixotic IRA that attacked Aldershot barracks or Big Ben in the 50s had been taken over by Brezhnev’s agents).but we never had to suffer from it (unless we lived in Birmingham or Guildford)

  20. 10-4, Chris Miller. I am of the “duck and cover” generation.

    I grew up in Aiken, SC. Both my parents worked at the Savannah River Plant. We lived 8 miles from the main gate. SRP was the Soviet’s number 1 target. And the #2 target and the #3 target. We all knew that if nuclear war came, we had no chance of survival. Double ought zero.

  21. @Gamecock
    I currently live a mile from RAF HQ (in US terms, think Colorado Springs). The local joke is that we’ll be among the first to learn that WW3 has started – for a couple of seconds.

    Of course, the threat is several orders of magnitude less than it was in the 60s.

  22. @john 77, October 25, 2018 at 10:51 pm

    Growing up during “The Troubles” did have benefits: not being scared of Bangs*, fires, destruction, inconvenience etc. Also very little normal crime and police relaxed about speeding etc.

    Worst part for me was I could not sleep until both parents home. Memorable was seeing a bomb go off in a pub 100yds away and seeing entire roof go up about 5 feet, then fall back into place.

    * even now I don’t “jump” when I hear a bang or gunfire.

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