Families on front line of soldiers' distress of PTSD

Families on front line of soldiers' distress
By LORNET TURNBULL
The Seattle Times
Published: March 20, 2012

It started with the nightmares — middle-of-the-night eruptions when her fiancé would jolt her awake with his screams, his body drenched in sweat.

Renee Paxton watched as the outgoing, quick-witted man she loved and would later marry slowly came undone.

A load master in the Air Force Reserve with 240 combat missions into Afghanistan and Iraq, Rick Paxton stopped eating, stopped seeing friends. Loud noises spooked him; the American flag flying on a building stopped him dead in his tracks. He hardly left the house.

The 49-year-old became combative at the very suggestion that Renee Paxton get them help, worried that revealing his troubles would jeopardize his chances to advance after 25 years of service.

"He said, 'We don't talk about this,' " she recalled. "Military people push that stuff to a different part of their brain."

But the fear that is keeping soldiers from seeking help for their mental wounds is also tying the hands of those closest to them — the silence like a fence around the family.

"Often they are living in fear, silently, like women in domestic violence," said Jennifer Ferguson, a licensed marriage and family therapist who worked for a year in a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) program at Madigan Army Medical Center south of Tacoma.
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