The Effects PTSD Has on Soldiers Lives

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 dark of his mind. While thinking about ending it all, he had one last impulse to reach out—and it was in that moment that he called the number and scheduled a visit with a social worker the following week. His anxiety left him. He held on for the few days in between the call and the visit with the social worker. Gradually—not right away—the social worker got him into counseling.
After a while, he began to return to a state resembling his “normal” self—though it has been a struggle and everyone realizes he will not ever be that “normal” person he was before. He has a number of prescriptions that he takes to regulate his mood, sleep, depression and so on, and they all help in his case—but there are many other veterans and soldiers who are either undermedicated or overmedicated. The right balance has to be found for each person because treating PTSD really is a case by case basis. The big problem is that even with all this awareness, there are still far too many soldiers not receiving treatment. The waiting rooms of veterans hospitals are packed with soldiers who are suffering from PTSD but only get to see their therapist for one hour, four times a year. Four hours a year is just not enough—and that is the huge issue. There are not enough doctors in the medical community working with soldiers and veterans to address their PTSD—so they go untreated. Even when they finally seek treatment, like my friend did, it is still a long process that requires commitment on the part of the soldier.
Some soldiers are not so lucky. They let the effects of PTSD control and ultimately ruin their lives. Their PTSD can consume them with anger, making them feel like being violent towards everyone they meet. Jakupcak et al. (2007) show that anger and aggression are common effects of PTSD among soldiers today. They never become aware of what triggers them, sending them off into fits of rage and hostility. They walk around like there is an enormous chip on their shoulder, eating its way into their brains, taking over their bodies so that they cannot even sit still without all these negative thoughts running through their brains. They hear a word, a tone, see a face, an expression, smell a smell or touch something that acts as a trigger and their emotions explode. PTSD takes over their lives and unless they make a conscious decision and effort to get help, they never get over it.
Others who do seek help have to wait a long time to get it. Soldiers tend to get served drugs by their doctors while in service to cope with the effects of their PTSD (Mehan & Schneider, 2007). Veterans who seek help through the VA, sometimes wait years before they can get help. The system is not set up in a way to adequately or effectively deal with the effects of PTSD among soldiers and veterans—and that is why the effects get worse, and the risk of suicide increases: the help that could be there is too delayed by the bureaucratic machinery extending out of Washington. Not everyone has a horror story of waiting for years before the VA approves their application for disability coverage. Some get through quickly. But for every story of a person getting an application processed in year, year-and-a-half or two years, there are more stories of people waiting twice those durations.
Thus, one of the worst effects of PTSD among soldiers is just the overwhelming sense of isolation. These are people who have typically been shot at in combat; they have lost friends in combat; they have faced numerous life-and-death situations; they have been subjected to mortar fire, the tension and fear of being annihilated by a suicide bomber. They have felt themselves to be viewed as hostiles in an enemy territory. They have been separated from friends and family back home for so long that it seems another lifetime ago and that the person they were before they entered the military is long gone and not coming back. All of this can contribute to PTSD. Anything can trigger a tidal wave of feeling rushing up from the depths to knock one over and drag him out into the sea of despair.
The effects can range from rage to depression to suicidal tendencies to paralysis. These effects impact not just the soldier but also those around them. One veteran I know suddenly went from having a normal life to feeling like he was back with his platoon: it frightened his new wife nearly to death. He would wake up screaming in the middle of the night. If they drove down a bumpy road, he would feel like he was back in a military transport vehicle and would start calling out the names of his platoon friends. She suffered a great deal just trying to get him the right medication, as first he was diagnosed with PTSD then he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. None of the drugs he was given helped to improve his condition—they only turned him into various degrees of vegetative status. The fact is that PTSD needs more than just drugs and soldiers with PTSD need more than just a loving spouse—they also need an effective hospital that can help. The VA hospital doctors are not always in a position where they can devote time and care and attention to every veteran who walks in the door. They give meds, just like the soldier’s doctors did back on the front. The individual needs more than that, however. Medication is just one part of the solution and often an ineffective one at that. How do you tell the wife of a veteran whose PTSD has suddenly come home to roost that her husband may suffer from PTSD but he is now well medicated and in a nice vegetative state, so no need to worry?
One of the big issues even still is that doctors are not sure what to think of PTSD or if it is even a real thing. That is why the veteran I know who was initially diagnosed with PTSD was then re-diagnosed with bipolar disorder: it is because doctors themselves cannot agree on what is wrong. As Groves (2015) notes, the effects of PTSD and traumatic brain injury are similar, though the methods of treatment are vastly different. Traumatic brain injury typically requires surgery on the brain whereas PTSD effects have to be addressed via therapy and counseling and most likely some use of pharmaceuticals. PTSD diagnosis is not simple and treatment is not always crystal clear. Every case is unique and every person is likely to have different co-morbidities that also have to be addressed, and these may range from alcohol and substance abuse to psychological problems such as clinical depression or in some cases actual bipolar disorder. Getting treated for PTSD is not like going to the grocery store and scanning a barcode and swiping a card for payment and getting treated like one picks up a product from 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.
References
Groves, C. (2015). Exploring issues related to PTSD versus personality disorder
diagnoses with military personnel. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 25(7), 731-745.
Hines, L. A., Sundin, J., Rona, R. J., Wessely, S., & Fear, N. T. (2014). Posttraumatic
stress disorder post Iraq and Afghanistan: prevalence among military subgroups. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 59(9), 468-479.
Jakupcak, M., Conybeare, D., Phelps, L., Hunt, S., Holmes, H. A., Felker, B., ... &
McFall, M. E. (2007). Anger, hostility, and aggression among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans reporting PTSD and subthreshold PTSD. Journal of Traumatic Stress: Official Publication of The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, 20(6), 945-954.
Kang, H. K., Bullman, T. A., Smolenski, D. J., Skopp, N. A., Gahm, G. A., & Reger, M.
A. (2015). Suicide risk among 1.3 million veterans who were on active duty during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Annals of epidemiology, 25(2), 96-100.
Mehan, M. & Schneider, D. (2007). Military overmedicating troops, counselors charge.
Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=3936723&page=1
Orazem, R. J., Frazier, P. A., Schnurr, P. P., Oleson, H. E., Carlson, K. F., Litz, B. T., &
Sayer, N. A. (2017). Identity adjustment among Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans with reintegration difficulty. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 9(S1), 4.