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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Astonishing. Thanks, SB
German, not graman army.....
More than once I've shut up a chickenhawk with the old "I'll show you mine, if you'll show me yours"...DD214 trick. Gets them everytime. I find it curious that the people I know who are most in favor of keeping our troops in harms way, are more often than not the folks who have never known the sound of, nor the exhiliration of, being shot at and missed. Damn easy to be a flag-waving patriot when it's some other mother's son over there doing the dying for you.I'm a card-carryiing, gun-toting liberal, and will be till the day I die! Robert David Clark
Let Walter Reed Army Medical Center, set him to the proper Medical Resource for this NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE!
sub sole sub umbra virens
Is the CIA once more in charge, Dr. Gates?
Another 9-11 in Santiago, or where next?
Patricia – you have something valuable to say, and you don’t think anyone’s listening. I know someone who suffered childhood trauma, with untreated PTSD leading to a personality disorder and an exhausting lifetime spent escaping intrusive memories. Her drug of choice is cannabis, which I don’t think is coincidental given its effects on memory. The thing about pharmacological treatment of disorders is that, regardless of symptom relief, people rarely end up feeling like, “This is just what I need and want, long term.” Not to mention side effects, dependence and cost. Also, PTSD is about a lot more than intrusive memories. But maybe I misunderstood.
In both childhood and adult PTSD it appears that a sense of loss of control over one’s own safety and the failure to respond functionally by others to whom safety has been entrusted are key factors. When it’s forbidden or psychologically too toxic to attribute blame for traumatic events externally, where it almost always belongs, then blame gets internalized and adds to the “psychology of helplessness”. (“I was responsible for the safety of myself and others, I failed, so I can’t feel safe.”)
One therapeutic approach that can be useful is narrative reframing. By increasingly representing the traumatic experiences and their context symbolically, realistically, and cognitively, they may become distanced from more affective and felt representations which are tied to limbic system responses (like hypervigilance, fight-or-flight, etc.) symptomatic of PTSD, and distanced from the psychology of self blame and helplessness.
But what would therapeutically useful and realistic reframing look like for an Iraqi vet? What would help regain a sense of ability to control safety in his environment, a sense that the witnessed carnage and threats to her life didn’t result from personal failure or deficits, that his environment needn’t always be unsafe?
Maybe narrative elements that simply honor the truth: that she was placed in traumatic situations due not to her failure, but to a failure of her country to act truthfully, rationally and morally; often without the resources needed to protect herself; that he didn’t fail himself or his buddies, but that his leaders failed him; that they coped adaptively, honorably and the best they could in a pathological environment created by disturbed and untrustworthy leaders.
What may have most value therapeutically isn’t likely to be offered at VA centers. The reframing needed by vets won’t likely fit with the national lie that will attempt to salvage justification for the needless and senseless carnage in terms of a righteous “war on terror”.
...not expecting treatment or a solution to a specific issue, but as a habit to cultivate. The VA can be a focal point for such groups.
People who know where you have been and where you might need to go are going to be found doing the same sorts of things at about the same time that you are.
Be the victim of a happy accident and go where you feel drawn to go and speak the truth as best you can when you get there.
Yes, trauma is such a warping and demoralizing experience that you will find many old soldiers who are compelled to defend those who injured them, even while complaining of their feelings of victimization. It's a curious double bind, but don't stay locked in listening to only these people. There are others who have moved beyond idealizing the perpetrators of their wounds.
Look for the light coming seemingly from behind the eyes.
Like Ebonius and other who've posted, I'm a veteran (Vietnam era, 3 years nine months and 27 days, US Navy cryptographics and radio communications), and the ongoing meaningless death in Iraq literally sickens me. Bush richly deserves impeachment. The freedoms I served to protect are being used like a roll of Charmin by these fascist bastards. Please recall that the casualty figures, now approaching 26,000, do no include the psychologically damaged that I am certain number in the tens of thousands. Bush is a war criminal. I loathe the hoofprints on the ground he stumbles on.
and their families also supported him.
Bush got 80% of the votes of military families.
so they back this war.
these gung-ho warriors believe in bush, and he still believes in victory, so
what is the problem?
or is reality starting to catch up with their fantasies??
ps- and cheney and all those other chickenhawks support the war.
who cares if the majority of the public is against the war now, they asked for it by voting for bush
more than once, didn't they?
Echoing Alex O'Neal, somewhat, I am interested in Schwarz's point about the genetic predisposition to PTSD. My family has had mental illness through several generations, in each case apparently with a precipitant. In my uncle's case, it followed being wounded in Korea. (He had been editor of his high school yearbook and attended West Point; I don't know if he went through PTSD, but he became psychotic.)
After generations of mental illness, I have seen how contemporary psychopharmacology and psychotherapy have saved our family members' minds.
It is really a truism that conditions follow from genes and have precipitants: we have our genes, life delivers the precipitants, and we respond in different ways. I am against genetic reductionism, but complete study of a condition can lead to treatment.
A recent review article found in PubMed from Amsterdam finds "key candidate genes" in several gene systems, including those of serotonin, dopamine, neuropeptide Y, and several more, and also notes environmental influences. Point being, PTSD is complex, and probably not due to a single gene.
Also echoing Mr. O'Neal on history, Pat Barker has written a series of novels, beginning with Regeneration about the actual British psychiatrist William Rivers treating shellshocked soldiers during World War I.
The late psychiatrist Theodore Nadelson wrote Trained To Kill (2005) based on two decades of treating Vietnam Vets.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
