Post-traumatic stress disorder hitting World War II vets

Yesterday's veterans are the same as today's veterans. It's not that they didn't know they had PTSD from combat. They just didn't know what it was. For anyone still out there saying that PTSD is an excuse for getting government money from the VA, explain why it is that so many veterans never sought money all these years while they were suffering! It blows that theory away. Talk to any family member of a WWII veteran, Korean War veteran or Vietnam veteran and you'll be able to understand how much they suffered, just as today's combat veterans are suffering. Now think what could be accomplished today if they receive the help they need to heal. Do you think for a second they would not want to return to as close to "normal" as possible even though they will receive either no disability checks or very low ones? They would take it in a heartbeat as long as they were being treated instead of suffering in silence the way the older veterans did.

For older veterans, it's too late to undo all they have carried but it's not too late to heal and restore "life" back into living. My husband did. Medication and therapy have helped him greatly and he went without help from 1971 when he came home until 1993. All those years lost even though I knew what PTSD was and was helping other veterans since 1982, he wouldn't listen. There were too few seeking help and no one he knew was going to the VA. That is, that he knew of. It turned out there were a lot more than he ever imagined because they just wouldn't talk about it. It took a trip to the Veteran's Center in Boston before he understood that what he was carrying in him was a wound from Vietnam. It happened to his nephew as well. He was a Vietnam veteran with PTSD but ended up committing suicide.

Read this report and please watch the video. If you have never seen Ken Burns, The War, try to find it on PBS and understand this wound is not about what they can gain from VA compensation, it's about what they lost because they didn't get the help they needed when they came home.

Post-traumatic stress disorder hitting World War II vets
Posted by Brian Albrecht/Plain Dealer Reporter July 15, 2009 22:07PM
VIDEO: Peter Carnabuci, of Maple Heights, recalls scenes of combat and concentration camps during World War II that have troubled him in recent years.

World War II vet talks about post-traumatic stress disorder

They thought they had locked up the memories and thrown away the key.

Talking meant remembering, so many veterans of World War II didn't speak about the scenes of carnage and combat they saw more than 60 years ago. Not even to their wives or children.

Suck it up, lock it away.

Problem was, there was more than one key.

Decades later those visions of horror have seeped to the surface in nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety and emotional numbness -- symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

PTSD, more commonly associated with the war in Vietnam and the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, is showing up in veterans whose fighting days may be long gone but are far from forgotten.

The Department of Veterans Affairs' National Center for PTSD estimated that 1 in 20 of the nation's 2.5 million surviving World War II vets suffers from the disorder.
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Post-traumatic stress disorder hitting World War II vets