Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is a soldier’s worse nightmare. We have to live with the images of death, the sounds of gunfire and always being constantly aware of those around us.
Throughout my presentation, I will be referring to Post-traumatic Stress as PTSD. I will give you my story about how and why I have PTSD, and once I finish my story everyone here today will have an idea what we soldiers go through on an everyday basis as I present to everyone with this time line perspective. Which includes defining what PTSD is, types of PTSD, and some of the symptoms of PTSD, and once you understand what PTSD is, I will give a historical evolution on PTSD that covers three eras of PTSD: Pre-Vietnam, Vietnam and Post Vietnam, and then I will finally give my concluding statement for my presentation today.
My Story
As many of you know, I am a veteran of the Iraq War. I went into the war zone in November of 2003 until October of 2004, and what I came back with was a bad back and many bad memories. I will not be giving a speech so everyone can feel sorry me. I am giving this presentation to give you an idea of what happens to a human mind once they enter a war zone. In a war zone, the main priority is survival, followed by living with the fact you might have to kill another human being. During specific points in my time in Iraq my PTSD would begin to formulate and get ready to explode when it was ready to.
These hands have seen death, but not in the way that I pulled the trigger of my weapon and killed someone, but in the way that I was asked to help deliver bodies of dead soldiers to the morgue so they could go home to their families. I did this duty twice, and that is all it took to lead me into a dark path of reality that included a lot of pain, and very serious thoughts of suicide. The first time I did this detail I was completely fine, even knowing the fact I was carrying a dead body in my hands. The second time I did this duty it became the longest 5 minute ride in my life as I had to sit in the back of the vehicle with the bodies of people who were killed earlier that day from an ambush. To say the least that was when I suffered one of my biggest emotional breakdowns ever, and it took me nearly an hour to calm myself down and try my best to not think about it.
I talked to a Chaplin just to get it off my chest; it helped somewhat, but regardless of talking to him, it led me to an even darker path that I thought I would never go to. I was alone in my sleeping quarters, and knowing quite well what I was thinking about at the time, I took an empty M16A2 rifle and I put the barrel in my mouth. Then I waited a few seconds before I pulled the trigger, and when I heard and felt that click course through my body; I shocked myself back into reality, promising myself never to do that again.
There were many other events such as losing a roommate, nearly losing our Chaplin, and having the burden that an Iraqi that was working with us was killed because of his association with us. After getting out of Iraq and soon out of the Army, I thought I could be somewhat normal again, but I was wrong as my PTSD slowly developed during that time when I had my back problems, and then my PTSD kicked in during 2006. I have been able to keep control of my PTSD these last two years, especially in public. Sometimes my PTSD likes to appear when I am in public, and you wouldn’t even know something is wrong with me because of how I completely shut out the world and let this occurrence run its course.
My family does not even know that I go through this, but I would guess they have some idea, although, they don’t say anything about it if they do. Although the events were tragic enough to give me PTSD, it is small compared to soldiers who patrol the streets every day trying to keep the peace and trying to stay alive. Now that you know my story, you now realize there is a much bigger casualty rate than just the dead and wounded.
PTSD BACKGROUND
With my story in mind, the information that I will be talking about will give you a better understanding as to why we suffer the way we do when we come home from combat. PTSD is defined as an anxiety disorder that develops in reaction to physical injury or severe mental or emotional distress, such as military combat, violent assault, natural disaster, or other life-threatening events.
There are three types of PTSD that a person could develop based on the severity of the event: Acute, Chronic, Delayed-Onset PTSD.
Acute PTSD is usually the shortest of the three types of PTSD, as acute PTSD usually lasts up to three months and the symptoms are either completely gone, or the PTSD goes into recession.
Chronic PTSD is one of the most common forms of PTSD for a soldier depending on what their job was while serving a tour in a combat zone. It is worth mentioning that this is the longest of the three types because chronic PTSD can usually last for years with no end in sight, regardless of the treatment that a solider might get.
The last type of PTSD is called Delayed-Onset PTSD, which basically means that symptoms of PTSD do not appear in a person until after a certain period of time, usually six months after the traumatic event.
Although I don't fall under one category of these three types of PTSD, you could say I am somewhere in the middle of acute, and chronic with a small dose of Delayed-Onset
Symptoms. Because of how different the three types of PTSD are, the symptoms can be numerous or maybe a person can get by with just a couple. But because of how many symptoms there are they are placed into three groups: intrusive, avoidant, and hyperarousal.
Intrusive symptoms are emotions and feelings that come unexpected or force themselves on to a person. This includes fear, terror, despair, anxiety.
Avoidant symptoms are when a person is trying to avoid anything related to that traumatic event, such as avoiding feelings, thoughts, and emotions. In some extreme cases a person could emotionally shut down and depending how long it takes them to break this type of symptom all emotional feeling will cease to exist.
Hyperarousal symptoms can be easily described as heighten sense of aware of one’s surrounding to the point they develop symptoms such as anxiety attacks, insomnia and even paranoia.
War Origins
With that in mind I will now talk about the war Origins of PTSD which covers about 2000+ years of history, but I will sum it up very shortly due to lack of time it will take to cover every single war in that time period.
Historical View
In the research I was conducting for another assignment related to PTSD, I came through some interesting facts about PTSD. The first of which was PTSD was not called PTSD until 1980, but it had various other names or a description of how soldiers returning from war have changed. It is worth mentioning that PTSD has ancient origins that go as far back as the Mythical Trojan War and the American Civil War.
World War I
World War I saw many changes on how wars would be fought, with the introduction of tanks, airplanes and bio warfare. PTSD would begin the process here as it was slowly beginning to develop into the disorder that it is today. The first name that PTSD took was called shell shock and was coined by C.S. Myers in 1915, this was due to the exposure of soldiers being exposed to shells exploding near them. The symptoms of shell shock that soldiers suffered consisted of insomnia, anxiety, trembling, sweating and uncontrolled emotions.
As for treatment, you could say they were very barbaric. Because of how unknown shell shock was and that many military leaders saw shell shock as a form of cowardice, many soldiers were executed, some were given shock therapy, physical re-education, and even spending time in military prison.
However, one Army Major had a humane treatment that was very affective. Arthur Hurst used occupational therapy to help soldiers "cure" their shell shock. He made them do activities such as farming, writing a magazine, and in some cases reenact battles, and through all of these many soldiers were becoming cured of this shell shock. So the origins of Humane treatments of PTSD would begin with Arthur Hurst.
Vietnam
Let us jump now to about 50 years, when PTSD would begin its true origins, in which many soldiers were coming home psychology destroyed from fighting in Vietnam and developing extreme forms of the symptoms I described earlier. With the help of many doctors such as Doctors Jay Lifton, John Talbott, and Chaim Shatan, Vietnam vets would talk in group therapy sessions about the emotions they were experiencing, due to images and sounds that reminded them that they were back in Vietnam. These three doctors were able to compile enough research to introduce PTSD in 1980, in the 3rd Ed. of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
As for the treatments it was very trial and error, as there were not many effective ways that I could find that helped soldiers get rid of this unknown emotional pain they felt. The only thing that helped most soldiers was time. As mentioned in a 1990 survey about Vietnam and PTSD, Thirty percent of the three million soldiers were coming home with PTSD. When that survey was conducted again in 2006 on Vietnam Vet, the percentage had drop to 19%. Of course it is worth noting that treatment of PTSD has changed over the last 30 years, and so many soldiers were outright cured, or in complete control of the PTSD that was now a part of their lives.
Another interesting thing to note, is that some argue that only 15% of those soldiers saw actual combat, and that many might have been misdiagnosed with just stress related symptoms. Especially those who have jobs in the Quartermaster Corp that had develop PTSD.
Iraq
As we enter the 5th year in the Iraq war, the casualties are building up to over 4000 U.S. soldiers dead, and hundreds of thousands wounded or permanently disabled. Out of the survivors of the Iraq war it was noted that in 2006 that 16% of the soldiers in Iraq have been diagnosed with PTSD. Out of the 16% diagnosed with PTSD, the most susceptible are the soldiers between the ages of 18 and 24. While the older generation of soldiers who are in their 30 and 40’s as they are the least likely to develop PTSD because of experience of being a soldier.
This is due to many factors, one of those factors is moral judgment, in which a person between ages of 18-24 are still developing a sense of moral judgment of right or wrong, and that it could be easily twisted if under the right circumstances. One of those circumstances would be going to war and being able to kill someone and live with this fact. This one of many moral judgments that a soldier on the front line has to make when in a firefight with the enemy, and being to mentally turn off that hesitation before pulling the trigger.
The symptoms have not changed all that much since Vietnam, but more of the common symptoms from soldiers in Iraq include loss of appetite, flashbacks, and nightmares. However, thanks to many years of research and studies, being able to treat PTSD has become more effective with the help of various therapies.
Therapy
There are three types of therapy that can be used to treat someone with PTSD; Psychodynamic Therapy, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Pharmacotherapy.
When a therapist uses Psychodynamic Therapy to help a soldier with PTSD, they are making him or her focus on the memories of that traumatic event. By doing this, the soldier will be able to bring out their intense emotions, almost reaching the breaking point. Afterward, the therapist and the solider will talk about what triggered those emotions, and find a way to prevent those memories and emotions from going further then they need to. Almost like being able to force your mind to switch off before it reaches the breaking point, and then be able to move on each time those memories are triggered.
Cognitive-behavior therapy is considered the longer of the treatments, because of the extensive training one must take in order to control their PTSD through specific techniques and training. Some techniques a therapist would use are “relaxation techniques, stress inoculation training, cognitive restructuring, breathing retraining, biofeedback, social skills training, and distraction techniques”. By using these techniques, one would assume that a soldier would be able to calm him or herself after a brief time after a PTSD occurrence.
While it is not a therapy per say, Pharmacotherapy is using drug treatments to help with various aspects of PTSD. Depending on how severe a soldiers PTSD is, they will go through a trial and error process to see which drugs effectively target specific symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and insomnia. Then once these drugs take effect, a soldier will either go through a short-term or a long-term drug therapy usage depending on how well their bodies are accepting the drugs. As for the drugs that have been given to soldiers who are diagnosed with PTSD, anti-depressants have the most effectiveness because of how they chemically alter a person’s mind. The most common anti-depressants that are prescribed to soldiers are Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil because of how optimistic the results were after an extensive study into what these drugs would do for a soldier.
Conclusion
For soldiers with PTSD, Plato’s words “Only the dead have seen the end of the war.”, does bring some truth to the fact that the only way to stop the suffering from severe PTSD, would be to end one’s life. For soldiers, like me, who were not in the front lines and suffer small doses of PTSD, being able to overcome the pain and suffering has been my greatest challenge. As soldiers of the three eras of PTSD try to live on with the horrors that they have seen, being able to help them should be the goal for the government, which has not seen PTSD through their eyes.
That seems a tad over the top... 
