post traumatic stress disorder

[DrBenway]

An article about four unrelated incidents, where soldiers killed their wives upon returning from Afghanistan. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,81948,00.html
Wright served with the 3rd Special Forces Group in Afghanistan and returned a few weeks before reporting his wife, Jennifer, missing July 1. He was charged with first-degree murder in her death and had been held in jail since then without bond allowed.

The couple had three boys, ages 6, 9 and 13.

Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves, 32, a Special Forces soldier, fatally shot his wife and himself June 11, two days after he had returned from Afghanistan.

Sgt. 1st Class Brandon Floyd, reportedly a member of the secret Delta Force, shot his wife and then killed himself July 19.

Still facing charges is former Army sergeant Cedric Griffin, who is accused of stabbing his wife, Marilyn, 50 times and setting her on fire July 9. He faces death if convicted.


As I read an article about Uday, one of Saddam's sons, and how he sadistically tortured Iraqi atheletes who performed below par, I thought about how difficult it's going to be to rebuild this poor country.

After so many years of warfare and tyrrany, I would bet that a fair number of Iraqis have PTSD. Parents with PTSD behave in ways that provoke PTSD symptoms in their children. It may take a generation or two, before enough people are well and sane enough for civilian style democracy.

I wish we had gotten rid of Saddam a long time ago.

[DrBenway]

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_in_Iraq

The report spoke of public beheadings of women who were accused of being prostitutes, which took place in front of family members, including children. The heads of the victims were publicly displayed near signs reading, "For the honor of Iraq." The report documented 130 women who had been killed in this way, but stated that the actual number was probably much higher. The report also describes Human rights violations directed against children. The report states that children, as young as 5 years old, are recruited into the "Ashbal Saddam," or "Saddam's Cubs," and indoctrinated to adulate Saddam Hussein and denounce their own family members. The children are also subjected to military training, which includes cruelty to animals. The report also describes how parents of children are executed if they object to this treatment, and in some cases, the children themselves are imprisoned.

The population of this country is going to be seriously mentally disturbed for years to come.

As disturbing as the POW images were, I was even more disturbed by the video of Baghdad citizens and militia running along the Tigris, firing rifles into the river at any sign of movement, in hopes of hitting a downed British pilot. People seemed cheerful and excited.

This was more disturbing to me, because so many people were celebratory in what might have been an act of murder of an unarmed, perhaps injured, man in a river.

After the war, another war will begin, wherein the Arab states around Iraq will attempt to persuade the Iraqis to drive the occupying force out of their land. It will not matter if the occupying force is doing humanitarian work in an honorable manner. The neighboring states aren't going to be as interested in the welfare of the Iraqi people, as they are in the symbolic victory over the infidel invadors.

We had better be ready for this propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. We can't apply the usual logic of rational self-interest to our projections of how the Iraqis will behave. We'll have to take into account their psychological limitations, given their history of catastrophic trauma at the hands of their government.

{slight veer off topic] Post traumatic syndrome seems to be now the most fashionable thing to be afflicted with.

I had a major crash and my Doc then told me I had post traumatic stress syndrome( suffering flash back to the accident) he told me Ihad to go see a specialist in the field to get me through it, I told him when I have been in the middle of a bl**dy war yes I will but for a stupid car crash no way and refused to go. Anyway a month later my daughter was KO in a hockey match, we swent to seethe Doc as she was still suffering from headaches and guess what, she had yes post traumatic stress syndrome. WTF is going on?[/back to topic]

[Plutarck]

Originally posted by Biker Babe
{slight veer off topic] Post traumatic syndrome seems to be now the most fashionable thing to be afflicted with.

I had a major crash and my Doc then told me I had post traumatic stress syndrome( suffering flash back to the accident) he told me Ihad to go see a specialist in the field to get me through it, I told him when I have been in the middle of a bl**dy war yes I will but for a stupid car crash no way and refused to go. Anyway a month later my daughter was KO in a hockey match, we swent to seethe Doc as she was still suffering from headaches and guess what, she had yes post traumatic stress syndrome. WTF is going on?[/back to topic]

First of all, it sounds like to me the Doctor's field was not dealing with psychological/stress disorders - as such, it is highly typical to be misdiagnosed. Just as non-specialists have trouble correctly diagnosing and treating depression, so it is with stress disorders.


Now, about Post Traumatic Stress disorder/syndrome (I'll call it PTS). PTS is a certain, rather overused term IMHO, which is a certain stage/result of cognitive breakdown.

The human mind, like any system, has a certain normal range of operation. Just as the bones are well suited to deal with stresses of walking, sitting, and laying as exerted upon them by a person of a 'normal' (ie, neither over nor under weight) weight, the mind is well suited to deal with the stresses of everyday life without suffering much damage that is not self-repairing.

However, when exposed to a severe stress (putting the system out of its range of normal functioning), especially over a significant period of time (from a few minutes to months, depending on the circumstances and stresses), inevitably the system's condition begins to degrade, and normal functioning becomes progressively abnormal and corrupted. The ability to think clearly and reason are some of the very first functions that become compromised, but eventually all conscious functioning can be totally destroyed, reducing a person to an irreversible comatose/vegetative state.

What is rarely understood is that this is a gradual process, and that it can, in certain cases, become self-perpetuating. As the ability to think clearly is disturbed, and especially if plagued by disturbing images, memories, and thoughts, the mind can begin to exert stress upon itself, so that even when the original source of stress is removed the condition can worsen over time and will not correct itself.

The easiest way to understand this intuitively is to consider something much more close to common experience: damaged skin. Under normal, everyday, walking around conditions, the body's own systems keeps ones skin working without any assistance or interferance. The skin is protected by various mechanisms (skin oil, outside layers of dead/dying skin, plenty of extra layers of skin, etc) to avoid any obvious damage from common bumps and nicks and scrapes, but only to a pretty limited extent. When too great a stress is imposed some damage is done, but the body's repair systems have a normal range of operations too, and minor cuts and pokes are well within that.

Still, it takes time to mend the wounds and return the body to full functioning; it also takes energy, the proper conditions, and shielding from continued damage/stress to complete the repairs without leaving scars or reduced functioning, and to do it quickly. Just as there are devices to improve the healing of skin (bandages, turnicates, etc), there are ways to improve the healing of the damaged mind.


Now, a bit more about 'stress'. Stress is, in short, conditions and experiences outside the normal range of functioning of the mind such that special efforts must be made to deal with them. Like all the other bodily systems, when the mind is pushed beyond its ability to deal with the conditions, it begins to "shut down", seeking to avoid any severe damage. Examples of other, similar processes is hypothermia (blood flow to extremities is reduced in an attempt to maintain core temperature) and muscular exhaustion (if the muscles are worked too much they just "give out", and cease to function unless specially stimulated, such as by adrenaline - and they will eventually shut down totally).

With mental stress once breakdown/shut down begins to occur, thoughts become muddled, one cannot think clearly, logical reasoning becomes impaired, and one is increasingly vulnerable to suggestion, swings in temperment, and paranoia. This is the begining stages of cognitive breakdown, and probably everyone of us has experience them, but these are usually all within the realm of self-repair (assuming a self-perpetuating stress does not arrise, or the repair mechanisms are not otherwise inhibited). Later, however, the effects are much more severe, and include quite strange and erratic behaviors. I forget the names of the various brain states, but they were discovered and named by Pavlov, so you can look them up that way if you are so inclined.

Some of these advanced stages include "reacting to an atom bomb as though it were a firecracker", "reacting to a firecracker and an atom bomb as though they were the same", and "reacting to a firecracker as though it were an atom bomb, and to an atom bomb as though it were a firecracker". I forget the order of those, but one of the final stages is a kind of "not reacting to a firecracker and an atom bomb, as though they were both nothing at all" - that is, ceasing to give much of any reaction at all to one's environment, which heralds the begining of the ceasing of cognitive functioning. Around this time one can suffer a "mental breakdown", and if pushed even farther one can be functionally dead, reduced to a vegetable, comatose-like state - which is pretty well irreversible, and is the brains last ditch effort at preserving the core functions of brain activity to preserve life.

This is all fascinatingly dealt with in more depth, and related to conversion and brainwashing, in the book (yes, here it is again) Battle For The Mind (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1883536065/qid=1048776585/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_2/002-3235266-9437612?v=glance&s=books&n=507846). And as I am afraid I am out of time, I'm afraid reccommending it is the last thing I'll be able to do at the moment.

In closing, I feel I should note that this is the way ANY and ALL stress is dealt with, not just being in a war. Severe stresses like being tortured and being under constant life-threatening battle conditions merely bring about this process more swiftly and surely, regardless of one's temperment or constitution (unless you are insane, of course, which is the only way to avoid total breakdown). To give you some idea of how fast the process can be, no sane individual can be under battle stress for more than a month without exhibiting some of the early inhibited states of brain activity, and the 3-5 month marker is all that is required, when under active duty battle stress, to suffer a breakdown and enter a comatose state. 6 months is basically certain death for non-psychotics.

All stress is alike; it is only its severity that differs. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, to my knowledge, is merely a label that refers to the begining of any of the stages of inhibited brain function.

[subgenius]

Originally posted by Biker Babe
{slight veer off topic] Post traumatic syndrome seems to be now the most fashionable thing to be afflicted with.

I had a major crash and my Doc then told me I had post traumatic stress syndrome( suffering flash back to the accident) he told me Ihad to go see a specialist in the field to get me through it, I told him when I have been in the middle of a bl**dy war yes I will but for a stupid car crash no way and refused to go. Anyway a month later my daughter was KO in a hockey match, we swent to seethe Doc as she was still suffering from headaches and guess what, she had yes post traumatic stress syndrome. WTF is going on?[/back to topic]
Unqualified doctors (they also were not psychiatrists, presumably). Neither of the incidents you cite qualify as sufficient events according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (Must be outside the range of ordinary human events.)

[subgenius]

I agree with DrBenway, though, that the events many, many Iraqis have endured would easily entitle them to having severe problems. Add them all up and you have one hurting society.
And yes, we should have done something long ago, especially when we had already gone to war and were presenting them with a surrender document.

[DrBenway]

My plan for post-war Iraq would involve organizing and supporting women's groups focused upon childcare, health, education, and welfare. Support women as political equals to men.

The novel "Lord of the Flies" would have gone differently, I feel, if girls were on that island as well as boys.

This is not a female vs. male issue. I think that the relationship between men and women is helpful for both.