PTSD wrenches service member's heart, home

This never gets any easier. I still get weepy when I read accounts from other families, other veterans and more people suffering from PTSD. It still is infuriating when there are some fools claiming PTSD is not real and the veterans with PTSD are just looking for a free ride. They wouldn't last a week in the shoes of just one of our families.

There are different levels of the hell we live with just as there are different levels of PTSD itself. PTSD receives different levels of rating from the VA according to, or supposedly according to, the depth of the pain and how many different aspects it changes. It hit every aspect of my husband's life, thus, our entire family lived with PTSD.

If you want to read about our life go here and look for free book. I wrote it when no one was talking about PTSD and it was published in 2002. NamGuardianAngel.com You can also find the videos I made to help you understand it too.

By Rob Curtis, Military Times

Sgt. Loyd Sawyer, a medically retired Army veteran suffering from PTSD, has experienced vivid flashbacks, nightmares and a strong sense of guilt.

PTSD wrenches service member's heart, home

By Kelly Kennedy, Military Times
Sgt. Loyd Sawyer joined the Army to bring honor to death.

For years, he had worked as a funeral home director. His children learned that death was part of the normal cycle of life — that it's good to mourn for a loved one and there was no reason to fear the bodies their daddy embalmed in a workroom of their home.

But then he spent six months working at the morgue at Dover Air Force Base, Del. And then six more months in mortuary affairs at Joint Base Balad, Iraq.

After that, Loyd no longer saw death as part of a natural cycle.

The faces of dead troops began to haunt his every minute. Awake. Asleep. Some charred or shattered, some with faces he recognized from life, some in parts.

Once, after an aircraft crash, Loyd spent 82 hours lining up bodies side by side, the burnt remains still so hot they melted through the plastic body bags.

He took the images home with him, each of the dead competing for space in his mind. He spent hours crying on his family room floor, weeping as his dog Sophie licked away his tears, the only living comfort he could bear.

He retreated as his sons sought hugs and his wife, Andrea, looked for the snuggles they had once shared daily, hourly. He lashed out with angry words. He had known Andrea since they were 16. Now he couldn't touch her.

They'd never understand what he had been through. No one would, he thought.

Loyd was living a nightmare. Now his family was living one, too.

DISTRESS SIGNALS

Exposure to combat can spark several mental health diagnoses, and often they appear together. For example, people who have post-traumatic stress disorder often also suffer from depression or substance abuse. Here is a breakdown of common PTSD symptoms and diagnoses, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

A person is exposed to a traumatic event in which he experienced, witnessed or was confronted with death, serious injury, or the threat of death or serious injury.

The trauma caused a person to feel intense fear, helplessness or horror.

The trauma is re-experienced through nightmares, flashbacks or replays of the event. The person also avoids things that remind him of the event, which can cause emotional numbing. The person may refuse to talk about the trauma, avoid places and people that remind him of the event, be unable to remember the whole event, stop participating in activities, or feel estranged from friends or family, even feel incapable of love.

A person may also have difficulty sleeping; be irritable, jumpy or nervous, prone to outbursts of anger, or unable to concentrate; or feel constantly alert for danger.

If those symptoms last for less than a month, the diagnosis is acute stress disorder. If they persist for more than a month, the diagnosis is PTSD.

If the symptoms last fewer than three months, the diagnosis is acute PTSD; longer than three months, it is chronic PTSD. If a person does not develop symptoms until at least six months after being exposed to trauma, the diagnosis is delayed-onset PTSD.

PTSD is one of a number of anxiety disorders that cause people to always feel worried and tense, even when they are safe or in a stress-free situation, and the disorder also comes with physical symptoms such as fatigue, headaches, muscle aches and other problems.

As many as one-third of people diagnosed with PTSD try to numb their pain and bad memories by abusing drugs and alcohol, leading to substance-abuse disorder.

-Kelly Kennedy, Military Times

read more here
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2009-09-18-ptsd-military_N.htm?csp=34