At yesterday’s Thanksgiving dinner, one of my old friends, a Korean war vet, let it slip that when he was stationed in Korea, there was an epidemic of suicides.

I don’t know how I’d react if I’d enlisted to fight the enemy who struck us on Sept 11, then was sent to battle in Iraq where a million or more civilians have been slaughtered….needlessy.

Maha, your comment about depression is spot on.
Depression is a major factor in my brother’s life, the cancer he neglected because of his depression will kill him.
The world we live in is more stressful every day.I feel lucky that I thrive on chaos, have a solid marriage, and realize there is no true security.I fear those three things will soon be tested as our economy slides into recession (or worse).
Great post and comments………..

which suggested that soldiers returning from the ‘War on Terror’ are 4 times as likely as civilians to commit suicide. This is not ‘normal’ or healthy.

The US has recruited thousands of soldiers to do what those young men & women expect will be a patriotic act, and thrust them into a chaos where they see evil done to civilians by militias, and by the US, and they witness their comrads victims of that chaos, and they see how removed our ‘leaders’ are in reporting the true situation. And they return home and get welcomed as ‘heros’ by people who are disconnected from any objective understanding of the war.

Perhaps those who commit suicide are just unable to open new mental ‘boxes’ for the experiences they can’t integrate into what politicians and civilians want to make this war appear to be.

The slaughter of people by other people, if you look at anthropology, is not normal. Other animals compete, but seldom will a dog kill another dog, elephants or bulls may vie for control of a herd, but the vanquished is expelled, not slaughtered. Robert Heinlen suggested - and I paraphrase - that this is the price we pay for getting to the top of the food chain; we have to provide our own competition because we have no natural enemies, predators to thin out the weak or old from the herd.

Sadly, we have become too proficient at killing. My hope is that we can evolve as a species in my lifetime, on a global scale to control our rate of reproduction, become responsible stewards of the planet, and overcome the instinct, if natural instict it is, to commit murder of other humans because they differ from our tribe.

mark
carlisle iowa

The military training has evolved over the last few decades to reflect that, to break down that resistance to pulling the trigger while aiming at another human being. Even if all that does is break down the personal control we each have over our baser instincts it does not at all mean that once a soldier who has had that control trained out of him or her is out of that war zone that an equally vigorous effort must then be made to reconnect them with those personal controls that were removed by both training and the experience of war.

This still requires treatment and it still requires recognizing that instincts which we may possess, but which our very socialization ensures are kept from controlling us, that have been enhanced both by training and war must once again be returned to a state of control.

Grim is wrong here “Everyone around you is just like you. They don’t know it, but they are. You are not sick; you are not broken. Everyone else is just the same.” By his own admission at the top of his argument everyone else is not “just the same” because they are keeping those instincts in check and the returning soldier has had that check removed by training or circumstance. Getting those instincts back in check doesn’t happen magically anymore than killing in combat happens magically, it must be conditioned into the soldier.

I suspect Grim is a product of recent training but no understand why that training is the way it is nor the history of soldiers in combat.

I have treated PTSD for about 14 years now. The work I have done is primarily with with male and female survivors of childhood abuse and rape. The term residue is spot on from my perspective. To build on the idea of residue– one idea is it exists perhaps in biochemical nodes that are easily activated by particular stimuli sending data to the area of the brain that converts it to internal sensory experience.

I ask folks to think about electrical circuits that have had too much electrical energy run through them and evidence melted plastic and carbon char. When we have experienced anything that overwhelms our sensory processing system it leaves residue in the context of reality and survival. Some of it can be processed and integrated, some of it is just too extreme for the usual framework of understanding to handle.

I have attempted to work with veterans and find it more difficult because their training and experience creates a mask and some times, the mask has become the face. Not faulting them as the mask is necessary for survival and competent performance in the face of death.

PTSD syndrome can produce a broad range of symptoms including depression, panic and mania. One has little to no control of flashbacks and symptomatic reactions. The veteran cited above sounds like he is constructing a framework with emphasis on normalizing and depathologizing.

Mindfulness is perhaps one of the best approaches for learning to desensitize the situational stimuli that can activate the residue nodes. I try to teach folks to learn to keep one foot in the here and now while the other foot is in the flashback so that we can test the reality of what is actually happening now. Essentially new neural circuits are required and those have to be built one painful draining step at a time.

Nice post within a broad range of topics for we your fans.