Soldiers' Stress: What Doctors Get Wrong about PTSD

Photo: DISTRESS CAN BE a normal response to pain and loss or a sign of a psychic wound that is failing to heal. Critics of PTSD diagnostic criteria, including many soldiers, feel that returning veterans natural process of adjustment is often mislabeled as a dysfunctional state. TYLER HICKS New York Times

From Scientific American:

A growing number of experts insist that the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder is itself disordered and that soldiers are suffering as a result.

In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens's problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: the condition was real enough, but as a diagnosis he saw it being wildly, even dangerously, overextended.

Stevens led the medics tending an armored brigade of 800 soldiers, and his team patched together GIs and Iraqi citizens almost every day. He saw horrific things. Once home, he said he had his share of "nights where I'd wake up and it would be clear I wasn't going to sleep again."

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My Comment: My father had PTSD. He survived the Russian Front in the Second World War (served in the Soviet Army) .... and growing up I learned a considerable amount of PTSD before it became publicly known from returning Vietnam Vets.

It is an experience that I do not wish for anyone.