Today AP writer Janet McConnaughey reported a study on post-Katrina mental health in the gulf region. Although only 3 percent of the 1000 people interviewed were thinking about suicide at 6 months after Katrina, the number had doubled by this year, and had increased to 8 percent in New Orleans. Ronal Kessler, the main researcher for the study, said that symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had also increased in the time since Katrina, from 16 percent to 21 percent.

Immediately a few red flags jump out in the news story. First, the results of the study are unpublished--so why are they being reported? They haven't been vetted by peer review, so they are not yet what you would call serious science. Going to the press with your results before they are published in a scientific journal shows that this is about politics, not about science.

Second, PTSD is a mental health disorder that can only be diagnosed on an individual basis by a trained mental health professional, not by a survey on a mass level. The number of people in the sample having "PTSD symptoms" could include people having only one of the symptoms of PTSD, when more are required for an actual diagnosis. For example, one symptom is that the person avoids thoughts, feelings, or conversations associated with the trauma. This would seem like normal behavior for most people who have been through a traumatic experience. The abnormal response would be to revisit it and talk about it over and over again--for example, the way the main stream media has tried to keep these people engaged in talk about how they were victimized, and how it means that someone else needs to rebuild for them (after all, if you rebuild on your own, you won't get the government assistance that is owed to you as a ward of the state).

Ever since Katrina hit, people in the affected area have been told that they should feel upset and miserable--but not at their liberal local and state government who failed to evacuate them or to respond quickly to the disaster. Instead, local liberals and the mainstream media have been feeding them the constant line that it was the federal government--and George Bush in particular--who let this happen to them. Witness Brad Pitt's contribution today to the propaganda machine. While helping to build "green" homes in New Orleans, he charged that Katrina was a "man-made disaster," echoing the common liberal fantasy that George Bush conjured the hurricane through his environmental policies, and somehow steered the hurricane to target the seaside liberal utopia. 

No wonder it is taking so long to rebuild. Apparently, not only do the proclaimed victims have to wait for someone else to rebuild for them, but the rebuilding also has to be more expensive than is reasonable, so that environmental wackos can be satisfied that the homes pay proper homage to the religion of global warming. Green homes generally aren't cheap. Brad Pitt and crew are building homes that create most of their own electricity with solar energy. I looked into a photovoltaic system for my home, worth $95,000 in homeowner-friendly Iowa, and found that it would cost $45,000--almost half again the cost of my house. But why should that be a concern when the federal governement is helping to foot the bill? It isn't worth mentioning, of course, that more homes could be built in less time if conventional construction methods were being used.

The lack of recovery from Katrina hasn't been the result of a lack of federal dollars--the state of Louisiana has been awash in those. But forces such as environmental agendas have prevented those dollars from having the intended effect. There is a culture of welfare and squander that has been bred into the region from decades of liberal rule, that encourages people to wait for an ineffective government to take care of everything, and then turns a blind eye when funds are wasted (after all, we can't hold elected liberals accountable for misdeeds, we save that scrutiny for Republicans).

There is also the need to maintain a permanent victim status, at least until the end of the 2008 election, so that the most possible political gains can be exploited from the concerted effort to blame the disaster on a Republican president. If the rebuilding efforts were effective, liberals would lose one of their showcase propaganda pieces in the coming elections. It is reminiscent of Democrats' efforts for the last four years to engineer defeat in Iraq--they are so invested now in losing there, that they can't afford to praise the progress from the recent surge, because any good news in Iraq is bad news for the expected failure that they've tied their political hopes to.

Note the political spin that is put on the results by the study's supposedly unbiased head researcher:

"Kessler, whose study is supported by the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization, said most disasters have relatively rapid recoveries, so rates for such ailments as depression and PTSD usually improve after a year. The results of the New Orleans survey are more like those of people who lost their jobs in Detroit during the 1980s and couldn't find new work, he said."

So what we really have here is not mass cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead, we have yet another case of people's difficulties being exploited for political gain by the liberal Democrats, and being asked to take on semi-permanent victim status in order to support the lie that Republicans policies are ruining people's lives. I have a new name for it: call it Liberal Operations Syndrome for Election Results (LOSER). It is characterized by intense media attention resulting in a constant barrage of messages that your life has been ruined by a Republican president, and the vested need to maintain that victim status at least until the coming election. Its cure: personal responsibility, hard work, and faith.