In the days following 9/11/01, a great many Americans learned for the first time what it means to endure post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Many others, some of them very far from New York, found their well-diagnosed, life-wrecking foe had been reawakened by exposure to the televised news coverage.

Those of us who struggle with PTSD, either from time to time or constantly, cannot afford to give ABC's The Path to 9/11 slockudrama a fair hearing.

Not if that means viewing the shows.

Even the journalistically responsible reporting which attends this anniversay of 9/11/01 poses a health hazard to some of us, as experts warned in the Scientific American not long after the attack:

"Obviously, we all want to be informed citizens," Ellen Leibenluft, a physician at the National Institute of Mental Health, says. "But the other thing is to titrate the amount of brain time people spend on this." If you find news fasting too much to bear, Erica Wise, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has this advice: read or listen, but don't watch. "It does seem that the visual medium is a little more intense," she cautions. "[With radio, anxious people] are less likely to have exposure to images that are going to be things that they see again and again in their minds."

Television is in any case not the best way to become and remain well-informed.

What it can sometimes offer is part of an antidote.

As a well-respected science blogger suggests, finding things to laugh at and smile about may be the best medicine for all of this.

There is, for me at least, plenty to laugh about both on and associated with television.

I find it more hilarous than outrageous, for example, that as the Houston Chronicle commented in a well-written editorial, the slockudrama's producer:

Nowrasteh has a talent for writing fiction, including the pilot episode of the popular spy series La Femme Nikita, and a little-seen movie, Norma Jean, Jack and Me, in which a shipwrecked man washes up on an Caribbean island and discovers President Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe alive and living out their golden years.

One need not suffer from PTSD to see hours spent viewing Nowrasteh's treatment of a key historic event as a laughable waste of time. Mad, really. Just plain crazy (funny).

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