About H. Nattanya Andersen

When seeing her first stewardess at age 5, Nattanya knew she would follow in her footsteps. Too young to fly at age 17, she instead began to sail as stewardess on a Danish freighter. Old enough to fly a couple of years later, she had married instead and worked as ground-stewardess for Lufthansa German Airlines at Copenhagen’s Kastrup airport. A few years later, when children had failed to announce their arrival, Nattanya fulfilled her childhood dream by beginning to fly for a large North American air carrier, in her time off sailing the seven seas with another merchant mariner husband. A “I never thought I’ll be a ballerina” uttered by a trucker in the local Workers’ Compensation Board’s rehabilitation swimming pool while exercising side-by-side led to another matrimony and trucking throughout North America. That took its toll, however, and through severe illness Nattanya learnt children had never been in her cards. The marriage failed. But, flying still her greatest joy and the world still her oyster, she enrolled in university as an earthly pursuit, which resulted in a Bachelor of Arts degree.

And then everything in her charmed life came to an abrupt halt with an engine explosion 5 feet away from her minutes after takeoff, the aircraft dropping like a stone. Numerous previous near misses had taught her that there was no way out of this one. We were goners. But fate dictated otherwise. Diagnosed with PTSD a couple of weeks later, a decade of deceit of such magnitude followed that she only understood it fully when writing her second book, The Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Fallacy: A Mental Health Industry Bonanza Of Profit And Human Destruction.

Despite it all, Nattanya rehabilitated herself. But when her psychiatrist declared her fit for a return to in-flight duty, all hell broke loose. While her lawyer conducted the battle for her livelihood she wrote Broken Wings: A Flight Attendant’s Journey (into PTSD). Never intending to write another book, an encounter with 26 genuine U.S. military PTSD experiencers including victims of rape during a trans-Atlantic cruise forced her to ask herself: ”How will you feel on your deathbed, if you do not write about how you survived 10 years of pure hell relatively unscathed?” Fallacy is the answer.

Living with her dogs in her ocean-side home on Vancouver Island, she presently works on Fallacy III.