Label Them Survivors

Label Them Survivors
by
Chaplain Kathie

There is a lot of talk about dropping the "D" from PTSD as if changing it again would do any good. Forgetting about the Disorder part of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder will do about as much good as changing the name in the past. The list of terms used has been growing since the Revolutionary War here in the US. The condition is still the same. The only thing that has really changed is in the way they are treated. There was a time in this country when they were shot for being cowards.

This is a video about WWI from the UK.
War Neuroses: Netley Hospital (1917


Here is another one
Verdun- Shell Shock
After WWII, a "shell shocked" became "battle fatigue" but the term was still used by veterans until PTSD was used in the late 70's. A Merchant Marine was sent to live on a farm so that he could live out his days in a peaceful environment. That Merchant Marine was my husband's uncle. While it is doubtful he was more troubled by the term "shell shock" as much as he was troubled by what happened to him and his ship. It was sunk and while he tried to stay alive in the ocean with the rest of the survivors, they lost more men.

Among the terms used for what we now call PTSD, there was "soldier's heart." There is a great series on PBS addressing PTSD and what it does after combat, Soldiers Heart. This series is from 2005. While it helps everyone understand what they go through, it also points out how much was known and for how long we've known it.

There is a huge difference between what causes PTSD in civilians, but we're more able to understand it, make it personal to us while thinking about how that event in the person's life could very well happen to us. We connect to their story as much as we connect to what happened to them afterwards. One traumatic event out of their lives changed everything.

When it comes to law enforcement and emergency responders, they face more trauma then most other humans will ever know but we tend to assume they were trained to deal with all of it. When they end up with PTSD, we expect them to just get over it more easily than civilians because they were trained to face it in the first place. We just can't figure out how deeply multiple events have cut into them.

When the person is/was in the military, well, that's a whole other story. They spend a year at a times facing trauma piled onto trauma, piled onto waiting for the next time. They can't just go out of harms way, recover and live a peaceful life. They have to face more of it for as long as they are deployed.

Even with a diagnosis of PTSD, many of them are redeployed with their weapons and what the DOD doctors think they need to finish one more tour of duty. A handful of pills. So we have a survivors of multiple traumatic events facing having to expose themselves to more of the same with nothing more than medication to fight it off with.

Maybe the time has come to label them what they really are and that is "survivors" because they have survived what few others would be able to. The level of what comes after is different for all of them but we have to acknowledge that none of them come back unchanged.

Some come back with just memories they learn to live with. Others come home with the memories more real than what they come home to. Some come home with mild PTSD and think they defeated it until another traumatic event happens in their lives and then this secondary stressor sets all they were able to subdue into overdrive. This ends up shocking them and their families after they have settled into what they thought was the worst of it. By this time, families look for other things to blame because it has been years since their veteran came home so the connection between war and PTSD is not there. They look for other reasons for the change and then blame the veteran.

Talk to someone after they survived a traumatic event and how they feel differently afterwards. Then think of how they may react after that same event either happened everyday or there was a threat of it happening again. Do you think their pain would be deeper? Sure you would and you'd understand it because it could have been you. With combat, you know it wouldn't happen to you because you were not in the military but you are only human just like them.