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Personal injury compensation claims made in Britain for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have come under the critical eye of the renowned BBC Panorama investigative team.
Compensation payments made to those suffering from PTSD and other injuries now runs into hundreds of millions of pounds every year.
Panorama calls it the British Trauma Industry and it was suggested that PTSD and other conditions are being exploited by those looking to make quick money.
Some 220,000 people are treated by the NHS every year now for PTSD, it was reported, yet the diagnosis of the condition was once reserved just for those returning from war zones.
Panorama pointed out that the UK is a much safer, richer and healthier place than the past - so where is all this new trauma coming from? Well, some cases of PTSD include people who have had minor traffic accidents, experienced bullying in the workplace, and problems at school.
As a result, there is considerable doubt that some PTSD claims are genuine.
It is at this point that the programme may have jeopardised its usual high standards. Most people may well consider a minor traffic accident something to be got over. However, bullying in the workplace or difficulties at school are not so easily dismissed.
Being regularly subjected to aggressive, intimidating, unreasonable or humiliating behaviour - or generally less favourable treatment - can cause mental illness, harm and distress to people, which may well be traumatic.
The programme did recognise that some civilians, as well as soldiers, do suffer appalling experiences that can leave them emotionally scarred - and such victims deserve proper care.
But the key plank of the documentary was that a whole industry has grown up around PTSD and injury claims. If that is the case - and that industry is built on a house of cards and many claims are false or fraudulent - then that is a damning indictment of society and of doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, insurance firms and lawyers. Are all these professionals just plain wrong to a substantial degree?
This point was never explored by the programme makers.
According to a doctor interviewed for the programme, people who are naturally nervous are supposed to take responsibility for their nervousness. That's a controversial statement because how does one assess how nervous someone is compared to another - and why should the nervous be discriminated against when making a PTSD claim?
If they are being bullied and suffering PTSD symptoms, how can they be judged to be suffering less than another person - not counting the obvious malingerers?
Maybe there is a real problem with the modern society in which we live and that's what the professionals are highlighting? A growing population, making a living, surviving the contemporary (often competitive) culture, trapped by mortgage debts and high rents, being pushed by business to generate more profits for relatively less and less wages, is gradually causing more mental health problems. Again, this issue was not explored.
Nothing must be taken away from brave armed forces who fight to defend peace-loving countries from aggressors who would kill innocent people. To witness horrific incidents and to then develop PTSD requires treatment and decent care.
But to overlook or at least partly dismiss the fact that 800,000 personal accident claims, some of them PTSD, are being made annually in the UK would be akin to ignoring the human cost of suffering. No one is genuinely suggesting that hundreds of thousands of UK people are telling downright lies and distorting the truth for fraudulent gain, are they?
It is absolutely right that a sceptical media - like the BBC Panorama programme - should question what is happening and shine a spotlight onto the issues surrounding the personal accident claims business. But maybe growing numbers of people are finding it increasingly hard to live in today's Britain and these figures are a cry for help - and just the tip of an iceberg - rather than symptomatic of people who don't want to work or who want to be sick all of the time.
Maybe now is a time to take stock and realise that, combined with a benefits culture said to be endemic in Britain, people are undoubtedly suffering. The troubling cost to the economy of personal accident claims is currently calculated to be about £7 billion a year. Surely, that is the bigger issue and matters need assessing from this perspective.
Perhaps it's a naïve position, but if people are finding life harder then maybe, just maybe, things need to be made easier. Then the million dollar question becomes:what solutions are there to tackle that and how to get started implementing them? Let's see Panorama make a documentary examining that.
