Shell-shocked: Jacqueline Winspear takes on PTSD

This may help the general public finally begin to understand what it's like. I know it helped my Mother when she would read mystery novels and love stories. Occasionally she would come across a character with PTSD and feel terrible about them, around the same time she stopped telling me to get divorced. Before words of the writers of these books connecting her to the character, even her own son-in-law was hard to understand. It was almost as if she was just too closely connected to him to really see him. In fantasy land of the fiction novel, they can manage to what all the clinical studies and real life stories can't manage to do. I am sure that if my Mom was still alive, she'd buy the book.

Shell-shocked: Jacqueline Winspear, Iraq vets, and the EPICON study
Jacqueline Winspear, England-born and raised, is the author of the award-winning, wildly popular Maisie Dobbs mystery books - whose latest installment is titled Among the Mad. In it, Winspear, with characteristic British practicality and compassion, explores territory few writers dare to tread - the psychic cost of war. The EPICON study, just released, explored the same territory in the lives of returning men of one troop exposed to multiple tours and higher levels of conflict. The EPICON study analyzed a cluster of murders in Colorado committed by members of this troop. According to the AP "The psychological trauma of fierce combat in Iraq may have helped drive soldiers in a single battle-scarred Army unit to kill as many as 11 people after their return home, the military said."

Specifically, study subjects said they "carried weapons with them because they felt 'naked' and unsafe and had difficulty transitioning to civilian life. Some said they felt 'weird' and didn't fit in, the Army report said. 'There, we were the law; here, the cops are the law,' one of the accused told investigators."

Jacqueline Winspear's books are set in post-World-War I England.

Shell-shocked: Jacqueline Winspear