I wanted to write a brief and simple note that might prompt a deeper discussion with regard to redress, justice, closure and recovery - that has been my greatest delusion for the day thus far.

I find myself in the system seeking justice while penniless and powerless which leaves me at the whim of the no win, no fee system; you see I had by chance experienced a collection of telling experiences, the first of these was my apprenticeship in a small Victorian town weekly newspaper in the 1960s whose editor was well ranked as a Knight of the Southern Cross in the local Catholic community along with others including the local police sergeant who had also sworn the same oath of allegiance and obedience to the Vatican.

Being one of those directly affected by the extreme nature of the outcomes of their joint actions that we learned went on to successfully cover up the sexual abuse of children and other crimes by Catholic clergy for the next 50+ years across every police and every government regulatory institution at every level across the country denying them their human rights in the process of those crimes against humanity until the issue began to be examined by the Royal Commission in 2013.

Today we are expected to believe that what allowed a cultural excusing of rape by one sector of the community to be overlooked for decade after decade no longer exists as an issue and along with that in a puff of spin go the many other issue those came with those social, moral and ethical failures that sold us stranger danger while clergy and co-conspirators raped our children. We reported to police who simply beat and bullied us with many being consumed by the failed criminal justice system or resorted to taking their own lives with their own hands in an attempt to evade the horrors of the ongoing daily suffering they experience in this failed system.

What set of bizarre events might spring from a systemic failure that is rooted at the deepest levels of authority, law, order, justice, morality and human conscience for more than a thousand years.

This failure is possibly the biggest longest persisting failure the Catholic and Christian Churches have ever experienced. Global communication and knowledge continue to work against old out-dated systems of mythology. They may go on in practiced denial however, their appalling human rights abusing actions will never be gone and will never be forgotten.

It's "Complex".

Even more so when you can be diagnosed and successfully treated using trauma informed and evidence based practices for CPTSD. Until you get to the public health system where CPTSD does not exist simply because it does not appear in an American Psychiatry diagnostic and statistical manual despite repeated validation through research and evidence.

Concerns about the misdiagnosis of sexual abuse victims surfaced early; Bessel van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Judith Herman, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, began to wonder if the developments were correct. What if these patients didn’t have disordered personalities, but were suffering the psychological consequences of childhood abuse? Herman and van der Kolk found that 81% of patients diagnosed with BPD reported severe child abuse, including sexual, and/or neglect, usually before the age of seven. Van der Kolk and his team proposed that these people be re-diagnosed as having complex PTSD.

"For this to happen, the American Psychiatric Association would have to add complex PTSD as a new diagnostic category to the DSM. Van der Kolk and his team travelled to New York in 1990 to present their case to Robert Spitzer, one of the founders of the DSM and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. Victory seemed in sight: in 1993, the American Psychiatric Association’s PTSD committee voted to accept Van der Kolk’s changes and add complex PTSD to the next version of the DSM."

Twenty-six years later, nothing has happened except that misdiagnoses are common along with suicide and suffering and no hope of connecting meningfully and productively on this issue.

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