WWII veteran proves PTSD is not new even tough it is news to some

WWII veteran proves PTSD is not new even tough it is news to some
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
February 12, 2013

Before the cable news stations started running 24-7 news cycles, before the PCs and Macs started showing up in every home providing the public with a way of reading news from around the world, veterans were coming back home from war with what has been termed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

For some reason the younger generation of reporters have come to the conclusion that this is some kind of new illness no one ever heard of before. They believe they can get a scoop so they go to great lengths to get military brass to sit down for an interview. Unfortunately, they don't seem too interested in doing research on their own to even know what kind of questions to ask or follow up with what they were told with facts. This is why there is so much disinformation out there topped off with thousands of Facebook users mucking up what researchers discovered over the last 40 years.

Combat PTSD is not new. It is not the same as what civilians get from a one time event. It is not even the same as what survivors of abuse get after a lifetime of having their lives threatened. It isn't the same as emergency responders and firefighters get after many times of putting their lives on the line taking care of the citizens in their communities. It is close to the type of PTSD law enforcement officers get for the simple reason of being part of the traumatic event itself. They are not just responding after it happened. They are taking an active role in it, often meeting it with deadly force.

Still even that type of PTSD is not the same as Combat PTSD. For the men and women in the military, they are not just responding with deadly force, they live with the threat of dying on a daily basis for as long as they are deployed. They do not get to go home at the end of the day, back to where it is safe. They can't take a shower and wash the stench of war from their bodies or chill out in their favorite chair watching their favorite mindless TV show. They can't drive down the road to the next position they were ordered to without having to fear an IED blowing them up.

No, none of this is new. It has been called many things. During WWII it was called "shell shock" but the results are the same no matter what it is called by experts. It is a term that went back to WWI. To them it is simply hell.

Shell shocked During World War I, some people saw shell shock as cowardice or malingering, but Charles S. Myers convinced the British military to take it seriously and developed approaches that still guide treatment today.

By Dr. Edgar Jones
June 2012, Vol 43, No. 6
Print version: page 18

By the winter of 1914–15, "shell shock" had become a pressing medical and military problem. Not only did it affect increasing numbers of frontline troops serving in World War I, British Army doctors were struggling to understand and treat the disorder.

The term "shell shock" was coined by the soldiers themselves. Symptoms included fatigue, tremor, confusion, nightmares and impaired sight and hearing. It was often diagnosed when a soldier was unable to function and no obvious cause could be identified. Because many of the symptoms were physical, it bore little overt resemblance to the modern diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Shell shock took the British Army by surprise. In an effort to better understand and treat the condition, the Army appointed Charles S. Myers, a medically trained psychologist, as consulting psychologist to the British Expeditionary Force to offer opinions on cases of shell shock and gather data for a policy to address the burgeoning issue of psychiatric battle casualties.

Myers had been educated at Caius College Cambridge and trained in medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London. Shortly after qualifying as a physician, he took an academic post at Cambridge, running an experimental psychology laboratory. However, at the outbreak of the war, Myers felt compelled to return to clinical practice to assist the war effort. The War Office had turned him down for overseas service because of his age (he was 42), but undeterred, he crossed to France on his own initiative and secured a post at a hospital opened by the Duchess of Westminster in the casino at Le Touquet. Once Myers was there, his research credentials made him a natural choice to study the mysteries of shell shock in France.

The first cases Myers described exhibited a range of perceptual abnormalities, such as loss of or impaired hearing, sight and sensation, along with other common physical symptoms, such as tremor, loss of balance, headache and fatigue. He concluded that these were psychological rather than physical casualties, and believed that the symptoms were overt manifestations of repressed trauma.

Along with William McDougall, another psychologist with a medical background, Myers argued that shell shock could be cured through cognitive and affective reintegration. The shell-shocked soldier, they thought, had attempted to manage a traumatic experience by repressing or splitting off any memory of a traumatic event. Symptoms, such as tremor or contracture, were the product of an unconscious process designed to maintain the dissociation. Myers and McDougall believed a patient could only be cured if his memory were revived and integrated within his consciousness, a process that might require a number of sessions.

While Myers believed that he could treat individual patients, the greater problem was how to manage the mass psychiatric casualties that followed major offensives. Drawing on ideas developed by French military neuropsychiatrists, Myers identified three essentials in the treatment of shell shock: "promptness of action, suitable environment and psychotherapeutic measures," though those measures were often limited to encouragement and reassurance. Myers argued that the military should set up specialist units "as remote from the sounds of warfare as is compatible with the preservation of the ‘atmosphere' of the front." The army took his advice and allowed him to set up four specialist units in December 1916. They were designed to manage acute or mild cases, while chronic and severe cases were referred to base hospitals for more intensive therapy. During 1917, the battles of Arras, Messines and Passchendaele produced a flood of shell-shock cases, overwhelming the four units.

The bulk of the reporting done has been about OEF OIF servicemen and women suffering from PTSD and far too many taking their own lives however none of this is new. Good reporters manage to point that out so that new newer generation of war fighters take comfort in the simple fact while they are unique among the general population, what they are going thru is far from "new" to veterans that fought our battles long ago.

At the age of 87, WWII veteran Glenn Chaney finally received his PTSD claim of service connected disability from the VA. "Nearly 70 years later, Chaney is among the dwindling number of South Carolinians who fought in World War II. And at 87, he may be among the oldest to receive post-traumatic stress disorder benefits for it."

The truth is they were coming back home with the same enemy inside of them as this generation is. The difference is they came home, suffering in silence and isolated from others with the same list of symptoms. They did the same things this generation is. They just didn't get the attention from the press. No one cared. Long after the parades and cheering ended, their battles went on but no one noticed.

It happened to Korean War veterans. It happened to Vietnam veterans and Gulf War veterans and every other combat operation. The information was all out there but few knew about it.

This is why advocates are so frustrated. The research has been done for generations but instead of moving forward from what has already been learned, they repeat the studies and doom generations to suffer the same outcomes.