Out of the Woods

PTSD

Human beings are capable of unspeakable brutality to one another. The survivors of combat, of sexual and other assault carry the scars of these experiences for the rest of their lives. In our time, there are victims of ethnic cleansing, of racial and ethnic prejudices. Innocent bystanders to incurable hostilities between groups flee the violence. As refugees they live for years in camps, often under barely sustainable conditions.

Ineradicable scars are borne by persons caught up in natural disasters--the victims of wildfires in California and elsewhere, those affected by earthquakes or floods, and now the terrible effects of climate change.

Many of them never quite recover from their dreadful experience. They never quite believe that they are safe. In dreams and in waking the memories of their past fright, of barely escaping when family or friends died – killed, starved to death, succumbing to a disease that could have been cured. They are difficult to live with because part of their horrifying experience is always present; the unspeakable is always happening. They are always sad, they are often self-destructive, some talk about suicide, some actually attempt it. For their family or friends or lovers whose lives have been less burdened they remain incomprehensible and not reachable. Their pain disturbs not only them but their families and friends.

My father who served in World War I only once talked to me about being terribly frightened under fire. But he was depressed, sad, uncommunicative for most of the time. There was then, when I was a young person, no name for his condition. It was just who he was. People either avoided him or put up with how he was.

Today there is a name for his condition and the condition of very many people whose experiences exceeded human tolerance. They are said to suffer from PTSD (Post – Traumatic Stress Disorder). It is regarded as an illness. Persons displaying symptoms of the illness are told to talk to a medical person. They should talk to the doctor. It is worth thinking about the implications of classifying the suffering of the bystanders or survivors as a medical illness.

If PTSD were not classified as an illness, the sufferers of PTSD might instead be regarded as odd and more or less annoying individuals who were best ignored and avoided. Or one might subject them to criticism saying: "Look at these young men and women, they returned from the war, the concentration camp, the ethnic cleansing or what have you and they seem to be perfectly okay, they have families, they have work. Why can't you be like them and stop fussing about the past? Everyone has problems, everyone goes through hard times, we are tired of hearing about yours." We could call them self-indulgent, weak and expose them to general scorn.

Instead we treat them as persons suffering from a serious disease. We express sympathy for their continued pain and we try to help them lead as good a life as they can. That seems to be a definite victory for humanity. We avoid the temptation to be incomprehending, judgmental and cruel and, instead, we extend ourselves with kindness and resources to try to help to make up for the brutality of our fellow humans and often ourselves.

It is important to pay attention to these last words. A good deal of the suffering that afflicts participants with PTSD, that leaves fellow citizens of ours suffering gravely is caused by us. It was our government who sent our soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq and still leaves them there after many years of utterly futile and unjustifiable warfare. It was our government that sent our soldiers to Vietnam to die in a humiliating defeat. It was our government that sent Native American children to schools where they were supposed to forget their own culture, their language, their families and their people. It was our government that overthrew properly elected governments in many Latin American countries, in Iran and elsewhere, replacing them with often murderous dictatorships. It was our government who refused to destroy the train tracks that led to the extermination camps of the Holocaust.

These are important facts to remember but treating the suffering that the survivors of these actions still bear every day as a disease tends to make us overlook our own complicity in these events. We do not ask about the people responsible for people contracting a disease. If I come down with a tick-borne illness no one is going to blame me for dealing with the leaves in the fall where the ticks wait to attach themselves to my skin. Whose fault it is is rarely asked when we talk about the illnesses people come down with every day. This person has high blood pressure, that person walks with a limp, another has cataracts or is hard of hearing. People have colds, the flu, and many other illnesses and no one asks why do you have that?

But in the case of some illnesses that question is important. Why do children in Flint Michigan have an elevated lead content in their blood? Why are many children in poor parts of our towns obese? Why is the suicide rate among veterans higher than among the population in general?

And with that question and the realization that the veterans suicide rate in the United States in recent years has been twice that of the population as a whole we return to our question about the causes of PTSD and who is responsible for it.

There are persons who are directly responsible for the incredible pain suffered in the aftermath of experiences that the human nervous system cannot sustain. Immediately they are our leaders – presidents, generals, industries that profit from wars, from incarceration, from climate change, the persons who sent soldiers off to war or the persons who agitated for a war from which they profited. In the end each of us is responsible if we voted, or perhaps did not vote for these leaders or did not oppose with sufficient force their election and selection as leaders.

Everyone knows that we are all connected and here is one more way in which the life of each of us is affected by everyone else. Everyone is responsible in more or less indirect ways for the lives and experiences of everyone else, as they are responsible for ours. We need to step with incredible care through our lives and consider the effects we have on persons often far away, of persons we will never know. We need, where we can, to remedy the harmful effects of our choices or our inaction. Passivity, inaction, excuses are not permitted. It is immoral to witness the suffering of fellow citizens and to turn our backs claiming that we are not responsible.