We must be the healers that returning war veterans need

Thousands of years ago people were dying from infections we just take a pill for now. It wasn't that people didn't know about suffering any more than it was about doctors giving up. It took the media to spread the news with every advance in medicine to learn about what had been going on. People can't learn if no one tells them.

When veterans came home in America from the Revolutionary War, they brought the war back with them. The survivors of amputations reminded everyone around them of the battles fought for freedom from England. With the Civil War there were even more reminders that once the soldiers returned home, they were forever changed. With every war afterwards there were more reports simply because there were more reporters and more people to read the reports. The wound we call PTSD now was carried within them but only the families knew about it. It was a secret part of price paid. It was not until the Vietnam War ended that the general public became aware of what had been happening all along, again, because there were more reports and more people reading them.

Fast forward to the early 90's when more and more people plugged into the Internet and listened to the sound of the phone line connecting to AOL, hearing "You've got mail" giving them the ability to discover within minutes what was happening across the nation. When whatever they wanted to know about was found just by typing in a few words in Google. This link gave us the ability to discover what a small town newspaper was reporting on no matter where we were. Information linked us to everyone else in the country and sooner or later, we managed to find people just like us.

Today we have the ability to spread the word about PTSD so that this wound will be noticed as commonly as we notice a missing limb and remember the price of freedom is still being paid long after the wars have ended.

We must be the healers that returning war veterans need
10:57 PM, Sep. 25, 2011
Written by
Alden Josey
Recent comments in the media have highlighted the epidemic of suicides of military personnel, those in combat situations and those who have returned home.

It is increasingly urgent to understand and respond to the experiences of these persons, particularly the latter group, with empathic understanding of where they have been, what has happened to them and what they need from us.

Typical reactions displayed by some returning combat veterans include depression and anxiety in various forms, a sense of "not fitting in anymore," of not being able to adjust to the norms of civilian life, of intense rage of undetermined focus, and increasingly, suicide.

Clearly, a deep and powerful dynamic is at work among these men and women, and it is usually described under the diagnostic category of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Families and friends are often shocked at the difficulties of the veteran in readjustment to civilian life and are puzzled and dismayed when their friends and loved family members behave erratically, as if they had arrived as strangers from another and sinister planet.

These returning veterans have had a profound but incomplete initiatory experience of warfare in which their psychological landscapes have been deeply affected and their sense of identity, of relationship to their lives before this experience, irrevocably altered.
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