PTSD

PTSD And Psycho-Babble
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American and British soldiers have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for about the same length of time, and their casualty rates have been about the same. More than 30 per cent of the American troops subsequently suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, a condition that involves memory suppression and uncontrollable anxiety. Only four per cent of British troops do. It's a statistic that suddenly undermines long-held assumptions.

My own long-held assumption, in this case, was that the rise of PTSD in Western armies was mainly linked to a major change in the way they trained their troops. Before 1945, like all the other armies, they just trained soldiers to shoot. After 1945, they started training their soldiers to kill people.

The change was triggered by a discovery that General S.L.A. Marshall made during the Second World War. He sent out teams to interview American infantry companies immediately after combat, with a guarantee that each soldier's testimony would remain absolutely confidential - and he learned that up to 90 per cent of those American infantrymen had found it impossible to kill enemy soldiers.

They did not run away, they may even have shot their weapons into the air, but they simply could not look down the sights and kill another human being. At the last moment, they became conscientious objectors.

Significantly, however, it was only the private infantrymen, alone and unobserved in their foxholes, who silently refused to kill (but never admitted it to their comrades). Men on crew-served weapons like machine guns, whose failure to do their duty would be seen by their comrades, did what the army expected of them.

The lesson US military leaders drew was that while the soldiers' private morality made it hard for them to kill, the right training could overcome their moral inhibitions. So they changed the training.

By the early 1950s, US Army basic training sought to lay down reflex pathways that bypassed the inhibitions, by training soldiers to snap-shoot at human-shaped targets that only appeared for a few seconds. They also addressed the problem directly, psyching their young soldiers up until they believed that they actually wanted to kill.

It worked: by the time of the Vietnam War, 90 per cent of American infantry were firing their weapons in combat AND TRYING TO KILL THEIR TARGETS. Other Western armies adopted the same training techniques, with equally impressive results. But there is an obvious psychological price to be paid for all this, or so it seemed.

The Vietnam War in the 1960s was when the incidence of PTSD among American veterans began to soar. They had been tricked into doing something that was morally abhorrent to them, and that was why so many of them fell apart afterwards.

Reasons behind the trend
Veterans of earlier wars had suffered higher-than-average levels of alcoholism, depression and suicide, but that was nothing to compare with the PTSD plague that infected the new generation of veterans. The psychological manipulation they had been subjected to seemed to be the key - but then along comes this statistic saying that American soldiers are seven times more likely to suffer from PTSD than British soldiers.

So what is actually going on here? American writer Ethan Watters' recent book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, offers a highly subversive answer. It is that American society has been permeated by psychoanalytical beliefs about the fragility of the human mind.

This creates an expectation, he argues, that people who have been through horrible experiences will be traumatized. The veterans are simply falling in with that expectation, and exhibiting the symptoms that the theory says they should be showing. In Britain, where the psychoanalytical approach never got such a hold on popular culture, this expectation is much rarer - and so are the symptoms of PTSD.

Watters then goes on to speculate that the very high incidence of PTSD in American veterans is also caused by the decline of religion, patriotism, and other belief systems that once gave a kind of meaning, however imaginary, to human suffering. This is just ideologically driven nonsense: Britain, where the PTSD rate is seven times lower, is also less nationalistic and far less religious than the US.

But Watters' core question remains. Is PTSD really caused by what happened to veterans while they served in the military, or by the expectations of the civilian society they returned to afterwards? Suddenly, there is a case to answer.
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This is interesting stuff. Doctor Dyer does not pretend that he has the answers but he has some good questions. One reality not mentioned is that shooting straight under stress is much more difficult. The Guardian and other lefties in England are keen on marketing PTSD in the same way as Feminism & Homosexuality. Their intention is to destroy England and Western Civilization by Cultural Genocide leading on to Ethnic Fouling. Fortunately the men do not bother with that sort of tosh. They settle for the Sun or the Mirror. It seems that Marshall was only a brigadier general and a patter merchant although his results check out.

 

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
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Four thoroughly reported chapters make a devastating case. Many well-meaning people (who for instance flew to Sri Lanka right after the tsunami to help) and some straight-up money-driven forces (big pharma) have really failed to try to understand non-western ways that cultures deal with serious mental illness. It's a hubris very much in line with our other exports -- "democracy" to the Middle East, say -- but one that you'd think would be a little less egregious because of all the scientists involved. Hopefully this book, which was a smooth yet very detailed read, will spark a long-overdue debate. As a psychologist in training, I'm glad I read this book.
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A journo writes; it seems rather well. He does not have the scientific background but he can ask the right questions. Although Doctor Dyer, who served is not impressed by his answers.