World War One was the crucible of military psychiatry as it became clear that even the bravest and best soldiers could break down due to combat stress.— Mindhacks
Interesting idea. The discussion is of a report from the British Medical Journal, which includes this:
… at a time when we are much concerned with reducing PTSD in combat troops, it seems fairly plain that we could cut the PTSD rate by more than 50% simply by keeping the least healthy 15% … out of combat zones.
The two prevailing assumptions, here, are that the bravest and best—before they broke down—were the men most able to kill with equanimity and face the likely possibility of being killed with the same stiff upper lip.
A concept of bravery and, alas, manhood which originated with the state, which puts the nation state’s interest before the very human, very strong drive to preserve oneself. The breakdown of which is, perforce, the inability to carry on activities that in normal life would be considered psychopathic, criminal.
And two, that health is, then … unhealthy. The “least healthy” 15% might very well be the most vulnerable … because they know the system is the very definition of insane? Upside down and inside out? Perhaps they held onto this knowledge despite basic training. Freaks.
This, about the book On Killing:
The book proposes that contrary to popular perception, the majority of soldiers in war do not ever fire their weapons and that this is due to an innate resistance to killing. Realizing this the military has instituted training measures to break down this resistance and has successfully raised soldier’s firing rates to over ninety percent.
Finally, here’s a comment, a story from Sunday’s post, Make Love Not War.
We recently had a young soldier suicide in our little beach town—a place he came to because he had fond childhood memories of vacationing here. He came all the way from Colorado, knowing he was about to go on a third tour, went to the ocean’s edge, called 911 to notify them to pick up a suicide in a parked car, “… before the children could find him.” He took his life, because he could not stand the anger and the sadness and his desire to hurt others … he’d rather end his life than possibly end the life of others in the future. Simply gut wrenching.
{ fin }
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A nasty business, this war. And business it is. Usually is. It’s a struggle for resources, be they oil, water, land, hearts and minds. As much as we humans have a need for self-preservation, we also embody the impulse to kill, and the army just enhances that. I have done much soul-searching on the history of human conflict and war: sometimes it is indeed justified, but most times it is not. When would I pick up a gun and kill someone? For what? Self-defense only? I can’t say.
In the end, if we must engage in war, then at least we should take much much better care of soldiers – for their sake as well as society’s. Maybe, someday, humans will abandon this seeming need for blood.
“Military psychiatry” is a choice oxymoron.
As is so often the case, good fiction offers a much better understanding of essential human dilemmas than the British Medical Journal, quoted in the Blog, or endless other medical and psychiatric efforts to explain PTSD and what to do about it. If you want to understand “military psychiatry,” read Pat Barker’s astonishing and heartbreaking trilogy of novels about World War I. The main job of military psychiatry is to return partially broken men to senseless wars, and to release completely broken men back into society, where they fester in misery for decades, no longer able to have any approximation of healthy relationships, unable to work, unable to heal their dreadful wounds.
As anyone who has ever been subjected to the indignities and absurdities of what is called, pathetically, “Basic Training,” knows full well, the only real purpose of the military is to kill people–those who are identified as “the enemy.” Training soldiers consists of two things: first, learning how to kill other human beings and second, always obeying the orders of those in command, no matter what.
Tara says in her post of June 20 that war is “sometimes indeed justified…” Depending on who is doing the rationalizing about war, “sometimes” ultimately means “always.” World War II is often referred to as the “just war,” or even the “good war.” Tell that to the 50 million people, combatants and non-combatants, who died between 1939 and 1945, with the last hurrah of this wretched slaughter being Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
World War II was a completely unnecessary war, and therefore neither “just” nor “good.” We romanticize the great coming together of the Allies and the defeat of Hitler and the Japanese. As any student of history knows, the seeds of World War II were planted by the turkey-brained “leaders” who wrote the Treaty of Versailles, and who turned a blind eye–again and again–to the rise of fascism in Germany and Japan, until it was too late–and thus we had the “just” war. War is never justified. Never, ever.
All manner of experiences can cause PTSD–rape,murder, disasters like Katrina, but exposure to combat is overwhelmingly the primary cause of this acute and often untreatable disorder. (“Disorder” itself is an odd euphemism, I think.)
Notwithstanding the bogus precision of the DSM and its list of PTSD symptoms, I would argue that combat-induced PTSD remains both poorly understood and under-diagnosed. No one has a clue about the actual incidence of PTSD in either of the two world wars, partly because it was not yet a bonafide psychiatric diagnosis, and partly for the same reason it remains woefully under-diagnosed to this day: that is, if the scrofulous old men who cause wars and declare wars allowed the citizenry to fully comprehend what actually happens–psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually–to the legions of young men they send off to fight their unjust wars, there might be a true anti-war movement, based not on politics but on horror and revulsion against war.
From Turgenev’s 1861 novel, Father’s and Sons, a line which is lamentably appropriate to the whole PTSD tragedy:
“The true horror, gentleman, is that there is no horror.”
Indeed.
I tend to agree with the comment on Make Love Not War — war is a racket. A very profitable racket, to the right people.
Thanks for your more-than-comment!
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