Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Veterans Are Not Weak: The War Against PTSD

Veterans Are Not Weak: The War Against PTSD

Imagine being sent to war by your government. There is no alternative; “your country needs you”, after all, and escaping is tantamount to treason, so you leave your home and loved ones for the frontline hellscape. Or maybe you signed up yourself, lured in by unscrupulous recruiters preying on your youth and your desire for a better life. Regardless of the reason, imagine being sent to war - and then imagine trying to return to your previous life, once you’ve delivered and seen death around you for months or years. Unless you’re a sociopath, it seems obvious that this experience would leave you traumatized and volatile, struggling to reintegrate into a world whose rules you were forced to abandon the moment you were handed a gun. Yet those in power have always tried to escape their obligation to veterans, and that extends to denying the very existence of post-traumatic stress disorder in the past, and the prevalence of it in the present.
Shameful Denials
PTSD is not a modern affliction; for as long as men have gone to war, they’ve struggled with how to cope with what they saw and how to return to their former lives. In 490 B.C., Herodotus wrote that an Athenian soldier went blind upon witnessing the death of a nearby soldier, despite not being physically injured at all himself. However, PTSD was not recognized by psychologists until 1980, and the American government fiercely resisted the very idea from the start.
World War 1 brought with it the idea of “shell shock”, the theory that soldiers were psychologically wounded due to the physical concussion caused by heavy artillery. (40 percent of casualties from the Battle of the Somme exhibited signs of so-called shell shock.) By the time of World War 2, it was obvious that post-war trauma was psychological in nature, yet those in power - who no longer went to war alongside their subjects - decided that it was due to weak personalities. A stronger man, they said, would return from battle as the same smiling man who left.
The Vietnam War was the turning point for understanding both PTSD and just how far the government and the VA would go to deny it. Vietnam veterans were diagnosed with “stress response syndrome” at alarming rates (by 2005, 1 million would go on to kill themselves), but this was seen as an inherently short-term problem. If the suffering went on for more than six months, the VA would declare it a pre-existing condition and stop providing care for the veteran - the “weak personality” theory again, and a convenient way to ignore the horrors of war.
Coping With PTSD
It was through the efforts of anti-war activists that post-traumatic stress disorder was finally recognized and named in the mid 1970s, and in 1980 it was added to DSM-IV. Although the term began with military origins, it was soon recognized that the disorder also described the trauma following abuse, accidents, and assault. Sufferers cope with a constellation of physical and mental symptoms, and their pain may be acute, chronic, or even delayed for long stretches after the source event. No matter how PTSD presents for any given person, they must all learn to live with the memories and rejoin their communities. A combination of therapy and medication seems to work best - the medication to treat the symptoms, and the therapy to treat the cause. Weekly sessions with a psychotherapist is generally the acceptable minimum, while meetings with a psychologist to evaluate whether their medication needs adjusting are also critical.
An Ongoing Struggle
Of course, accessing treatment for PTSD can range from difficult to impossible for many veterans in need. Even after the realization that PTSD can last for years, decades, or even a lifetime, the government and VA continue to deny their responsibility to aid suffering veterans. Once soldiers are no use to them - once they become veterans - the government would like to wash their hands of them and leave them in the gutter. (Up to 40 percent of the American homeless population is comprised of veterans.)
Those who apply for VA disability for their PTSD - critical for accessing treatment - are regularly rejected by a bureaucracy who has the gall to claim that their suffering isn’t related to their military service. “I have never been shot at in my civilian life. I have never been blown up in my civilian life. I haven't lost an "adopted" child to a suicide bomber in my civilian life. And I haven't had to listen to a man's death over the Med-Evac frequency in my civilian life,” said one veteran who was faced with the VA’s dismissal. “All those things happened during my year in Iraq, but my PTSD is probably just related to my years working at UPS or something?”

There is no question that the government would like to rewind history to the days of shell shock and weak personalities. This shameful behaviour strikes at the heart of the government’s abuse of power - they’re willing to have their subjects kill for them, but they refuse to care for their subjects.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

it is only the poor and the middle class labor force families who get the blood on their hands, and do the killing for the elite social class and it' forgein bussiness interest companies that are in other nations soil, just like england did when u.s.a. was only the 13 colonys, and these solders went to uphold the nation's glory and honor when it is requested, either enlisted, draft or by force as in the past or by being a red, white and blue citezin who is willing to go and help, and come back as a nations midddle class hero, and have the bragging rights of a brave solder at least in his eyes alone and maybe by his immeditate family members.