A nation under post-traumatic stress

James Carroll of the Boston Globe did a great job on this. He asked the question about where this will all be a decade from now. The answer is, the same as it was ten years after Vietnam veterans began to show what PTSD looks like after it has been allowed to fester into the veterans' lives to the point where, they don't reorganize themselves anymore. By 1978 there were already 500,000.

What no one seems to want to talk about is that most veterans return home with mild PTSD. In other words, symptoms trying to take over their lives but they are able to fight against most of them. If they had been helped when PTSD was mild, then most would have recovered before their lives were destroyed, marriages ended, kids estranged from parents, careers ruined, crimes committed, homelessness and suicides. Mild PTSD is beatable but when life tosses in more stress and traumatic events, you might as well refer to it as "invasion of the body snatchers" because PTSD takes over that much. It's called Secondary Stressor.

Veterans may be very well capable of doing jobs, having marriages, doing everything they need to do, even pass off the nightmares and flashbacks, calm their nerves with a few beers or a joint or two, but sooner or later, life takes over, one more event out of their control and it all turns to crap.

Just like the late 70's and 80's, we're seeing repeats of mistakes made back then. Medications are great. They are given enough to last a few months and they are expected to show back up at the VA for more. What they are not given is answers, therapy, support or hope. All this leads to a repeat of the Vietnam generation and it isn't good. As of today there are still thousand without a clue what's been wrong with them since they got back home.

Unless things are drastically changed, like thinking outside the box for a change, then we are going to repeat all the mistakes we should have learned from. Society will end up paying for the mistakes it keeps making but above that, we will still lose more after combat than we do during it. The only difference is, we aren't aiming guns at them. We're just loading the bullets. Every day that goes by and we are not doing everything humanly possible to help them heal, we are contributing to their diminishing odds of surviving combat.

US Army soldiers carry a critically wounded American soldier to an awaiting MEDEVAC helicopter near Kandahar, Afghanistan. (Getty Images)

A nation under post-traumatic stress
James Carroll
Boston Globe

IT BELONGS to every citizen to have in mind what the nation’s present wars are doing — not only to US troops, Iraqis and Afghans, and the faceless enemy, but to the American character. We have come to understand that the brutalities of combat can shatter participants psychologically as well as physically.

A psycho-medical diagnosis — post-traumatic stress syndrome — has gained legitimacy for individuals, but what about whole societies? Can war’s dire and lingering effects on war-waging nations be measured? Can the stories of war be told, that is, to include aftermath wounds to society that, while undiagnosed, are as related to civic responsibility for state violence as one veteran’s recurring nightmare is to a morally ambiguous firefight? The battle zones of Fallujah and Kandahar are far away, but how do their traumas stamp Philadelphia and Kansas City — this year and a decade from now?
read more here
A nation under post traumatic stress