Maggie's Farm

As you note, all sorts of people, civilians as well as soldiers, can suffer from the horrors and agonies that we describe as PTSD. There are various treatments that work for some people.

Compassionate, patient, faithful care over time helps. Even the much maligned mind-numbing psych drugs help if they limit the natural human tendency to self medicate when one is going thru a living hell (as you observe, booze and drugs ultimately make it worse, and they usually increase the likelihood of violence or suicide).

Whatever the cause of PTSD, a person w it only goes postal after a terrible event AFTER a series of unusual and rare, aggravating events. Or at least things that don't contribute to healing. THe amazing thing is how dutiful, and suffering in silence most people with it become. THeir spouses know about their nightmares. Some unfortunate spouses know worse, and get abused. But the majority are ultimately resilient and heal.

I wouldn't presume to criticize the survival or coping mechanisms of Holocaust survivors, but it does seem to me that many of them continued to suffer for the rest of their lives. Awfully. And jsut because they weren't as vocal or visible as modern people with PTSD, doesn't mean they got over it. Terrible, terrible depressions and nightmares in some of the families I knew. The Jewish Holocaust survivors did better than some our family friends who were Polish or Russian survivors of the camps. We thought that it was because society is more supportive of Jewish Holocaust survivors, and aware of their sufferings, and has not paid as much attention to those of other groups tormented during WWII . Or it might have been because our POlish and Russian friends were living in agony with their countries under Communism back then (so they had not only lost family but country as well, and yet still felt part of the countries they had left). It helps in recovery to have a place you feel you want to belong to.

However, to return to people now with PTSD. It does make a huge difference who and what they return home to. And "treatment" is really only part of it. Think of the research on how bipolar and schizophrenic patients do worse in families with highly volatile families where they are badgered, nagged, yelled at. Just as people suffering from chronic mental illness tend to do better with calm, relatively stable and kind relatives who can NOT take outrageous, disappointing or scary behavior personally and who can be encouraging, set limits, and not become too enmeshed, so too with PTSD ( I know, it's hard on the families who get zero support). It's so tragic that one of the snipers killed by that shooter recently was trying to do just that: help rehabilitate a traumatized fellow vet by comradeship, friendship, normal activities that made him feel part of the human race rather than sick and maimed. Nobody wants to be labelled.

By contrast, if someone comes back from a deployment to a spouse who has cheated and run up debts on their credit card, is about to lose their house,and has an unsympathetic family, an incompetent doctor, and has a hard time finding a job, they JUST might be likelier to "go postal" than someone with a faithful, frugal and loving spouse who soothes their nightmares and finds them a kind doctor who finds them a stopgap medicine to get them over the hump, and insists they come to church even if they don't feel like it, and calls their old friends to visit and take him/her out when he feels like death warmed over. This lucky person will, likely, recover with time.

No man is an island. PTSD is not a disease, but a kind of soul sickness that is eased by love and understanding, that can be healed by GOd's grace, and into which the light of love can shine even when the person is still in terrible pain. All of us who have endured trauma and its aftermath know that what makes life first bearable and then worth living afterwards is that light of love and hope in the darkness. You can endure a lot as you struggle towards it.