I have seen first-hand the effects that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has on soldiers’ lives. Soldiers, both during deployment and when back home in civilian life, have unique perspectives and experiences from which they draw on when they go about their responsibilities and tasks. PTSD is like a bomb that disrupts that process, shatters the senses, and makes it impossible for the average soldier to be successful. For some soldiers, this struggle is ongoing because they do not know what has caused the change: they know they have experienced something during their tours of duty in Iraq or in Afghanistan for instance—but they do not know what triggers their spiral out of control later on. As Kang et al. (2015) have pointed out, there are more than one million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are at risk of committing suicide because of PTSD. When they return home it is as if they have no idea who they are anymore—or at least who they were. The person they were before their service is gone, and in place has come an unstable human being, who often relies on alcohol or drugs (opioids) to cope with the trauma that has impacted him. This is common among so many soldiers today returning home, this type of identity crisis (Orazem et al., 2017). I have seen it personally among friends with whom I have served and kept in contact with over the years.
Some make it out okay, but others get home and cannot handle the transition, cannot cope with what they have seen or been part of overseas. The problem is that many of them are never diagnosed as suffering from PTSD. Hines et al. (2014) emphasize the fact that in their research the actual prevalence off PTSD among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is probably much higher than is reported because many soldiers who return home do not seek treatment. Instead, they self-medicate. This occurred with a friend of mine who became a raging alcoholic. He went from being a mild-mannered young man when he entered the military at 18 to being a drunk by the age of 23. He had a wife and daughter, too, and they all struggled to deal with his PTSD. Even when he went to a doctor and a diagnosis was made, he refused treatment because he did not want to go into counseling, as he thought it would make him look weak.

That is one of the problems that many soldiers experience: they think that asking for help is a sign of weakness, and the military culture is not one in which you want word to get out that you are a weak person; so they try to hide their issues and bury them in alcohol, in drinking, in taking opioids, which are given them by their military doctors in the field literally without question—whole bags of them provided (and so is it any wonder why so many end up not only suffering from PTSD but also developing a drug addiction problem, too?). These stories are so rampant, even the media has picked up on them and begun to report the problem (Mehan & Schneider, 2007). The fact is that drugs are not the solution. Those with PTSD need counseling. My friend refused it—at first—because he thought he could handle things on his own. As he blew through friends, women and money and nearly lost his entire family, the reality of the situation began to dawn on him. He needed help. He could not help himself. This is often the experience for soldiers suffering from PTSD. They often think they can address their own issues. They are almost always wrong. Those who suffer from PTSD need serious help—counseling, therapy, an empathetic support network. Otherwise, it is like they are lost at sea amid tsunami-like waves of emotions that come and go and threaten to sink them every single day of their lives. I know—I have seen it.

My friend struggled with accepting the fact that he was not capable of saving himself, that he needed a life raft. He hit rock bottom eventually when his depression kicked in so hard he found himself on the verge of suicide. He did not feel like he deserved a wife or a daughter or a family. He felt like he should die because of all the horrible mistakes he had made and continued to make. He had refused help and now he felt so miserably helpless that the only way he thought he could take his life back from the drinking and the reckless, emotional behavior was to end it. Then, somehow, for some reason, he recalled the Veteran’s Crisis Help Line—and it was like a light went on in the...…the store. Treatment for PTSD is often a life-long process. And that is what makes it so hard for people to come to grips with it. They do not want to be burdened with the knowledge that they are likely to be impacted by these effects for the rest of their lives. They do not want to face that kind of reality.

So instead they turn to drugs. They turn to alcohol. They turn to lashing out at anyone who gets in their way. They lose their jobs or, if they have a kind, empathetic manager as one friend of mine had, they get permission to take time off, to collect themselves outside the warehouse, to sit in their car and get a few deep breaths in so that they can return to work in a calmer state. The PTSD never goes away. The soldier who gets it has to learn to live with it. It is like living with schizophrenia. There is no cure—there are only ways to help the person cope.

And coping is possible. I have seen many who were able to cope. I myself have been able to find ways to cope, through the support of friends and family, counseling and medication for depression and anxiety. I have found a balance in my own life between always being triggered and trying to self-medicate myself into oblivion. The way I got help was by confronting the reality full-on and acknowledging that I could not improve my condition unless I got serious assistance from those who could listen, understand, and give me direction. Now I know what triggers to avoid. I know what to do if a trigger does get the best of me. I have learned through cognitive behavioral therapy how to use my mind and my body to take back control of a situation in which my PTSD is about to get the upper hand. But I count myself as one of the fortunate ones. Not every soldier in this situation gets to be where I am today. Not every soldier is able to make it out, to get treatment. Not every soldier realizes that the PTSD is part of his life now and that the only way to get one’s life back in any way, shape or form is to acknowledge that and get professional help.