Richard
07-28-2012, 13:48
An interesting read.
Richard :munchin
Who will get PTSD?
Paul Kix, DMN, 13 Jul 2012
Part 1 of 2
If the day was pleasant, and even when it wasn’t, the two boys would march themselves into the forest, in the shadow of the Black Hills in South Dakota, and hunt. They were no more than 8 at the time, so they took BB guns — all their parents allowed them — and looked for small game, squirrels mostly. The challenge of it turned the boys, Brian Baldwin and his cousin Chuck, into sportsmen and then best friends.
After high school, Chuck went off to Vietnam as a helicopter gunner. Brian started college and joined the ROTC on campus. By the time he got his commission and completed flight school to be a Medevac pilot, the war was almost over.
Nevertheless, Brian’s military career took off: He found that he loved the officer’s life. Chuck, though, struggled. He came home from the war quick to anger, and he drank too much, moved around a lot and watched his marriage dissolve. When Brian saw him around the holidays, Chuck would want to talk about the war. Brian always switched the subject.
One night in the 1980s in his home in Rapid City, S.D., Chuck drank too much again. Only this time, before he passed out, he pointed a gun at himself. When he pulled the trigger, he left behind a second wife and a young son — just a few years removed from his first hunting trip.
Post-traumatic stress disorder soon entered the public lexicon. What haunted Brian were the signs he missed. He wished he’d pulled more bottles away from Chuck or talked with him when he wanted to discuss the war. Chuck was isolated back in South Dakota, Brian realized, with no one around him who knew the military, the images he’d seen.
Brian never forgot that. In 1998, after 25 years, Brian retired from the Army. He ultimately took a job as a project manager at the University of Texas Imaging Research Center, which scanned the brains of people who suffered from PTSD. “I wanted to make up for my own failings,” he says.
He wanted to know why Chuck could be affected by Vietnam in ways other vets weren’t. He wanted to know, in short, if it would be clinically possible to predict who would develop PTSD.
He met with Michael Telch, a professor of psychology at the school. Telch was intrigued by Brian’s idea but knew its limitations. It wasn’t easy to do a before-and-after study of trauma. In the civilian population, it was impossible to guess when a person would live through something traumatic. In the military, some leaders didn’t even believe in PTSD; the last thing they wanted were civilian academics questioning soldiers.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan changed that. Or rather, the veterans returning from those wars and the nearly one in five Vietnam vets who had suffered, or still suffered, from PTSD provided irrefutable proof that the military needed to look for ways to treat the condition.
Brian had spent part of his career at nearby Fort Hood, and in 2007 he and Telch approached Army leaders at the base about a study. Telch wanted to put soldiers through a battery of tests before they deployed, have them fill out online journals during their tour, and then follow them for a time after they had returned to the States.
Fort Hood agreed. Telch ran his tests and, once the soldiers had come home and he could analyze his results, found something intriguing: If soldiers exhibited certain physical and emotional characteristics before deployment, they were more likely to suffer from PTSD after it. As Brian Baldwin would have hoped, it appears as though PTSD can be predicted.
Telch’s work is part of a provocative new strand of PTSD research, using modern psychology and computer science to unlock why and when a traumatic experience can derail a life. These studies — not just in military but civilian populations, too, testing cops and other first responders — hold the potential to transform our understanding of PTSD, changing it from an enigmatic and disruptive affliction that crashes over some people but not others, to a condition that can actually be predicted, quantified and prepared for.
While it sounds promising, the new research also raises ethical questions: If it becomes possible to screen enlistees for their vulnerability to PTSD, is it fair to keep some out of combat and send in others, especially in an all-volunteer military where every solider has raised his or her hand to take the same risks? If you send these potentially troubled enlistees to war anyway, what is your liability for any harm they do to themselves afterward? Or to others?
Telch says he and his researchers have measured soldiers “in all sorts of things that haven’t really been looked at in a prospective study.”
Even if a test is developed, some PTSD experts question whether we should screen soldiers at all. To do so could create the impression that battle trauma is something orderly, even manageable, when war itself is chaos and the consequences of facing combat uncontrollable. To screen soldiers for PTSD, some experts believe, is to pretend war is something it’s not.
PTSD may be a relatively new phrase, but the problem it describes is as old as any history of war. In The Iliad, for instance, after the great warrior Achilles hears that a friend has died while fighting in his place, he scoops dirt into his hands and pours it over his body; he pulls out his hair; he says, “Nothing matters to me now.” In a rage, he finds Hector, the man who killed his friend, and spears him through the neck. He then ties the body to his chariot and drags the corpse through the streets. What Achilles endures — the torture of knowing that his life came at the expense of his friend’s death — is “also the story of many combat veterans, from Vietnam and other long wars,” writes Jonathan Shay, a former psychiatrist at Boston’s Department of Veteran Affairs Outpatient Clinic, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007 for examining psychological trauma in The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Though it may not have gone by the name PTSD, other cultures in other times have acknowledged it and tried to treat it. Many Native American tribes, for instance, held initiation ceremonies for warriors at every stage of their lives, says Edward Tick, a clinical psychotherapist who is training Army chaplains in dealing with PTSD. “In Lakota tribes,” Tick says, “PTSD was called something that meant ‘The spirits left him.’” The tribe comforted the warrior for days or weeks and held a ceremony when they felt he had regained his equilibrium.
Russia is seen as the first modern society to treat psychological wounds. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905, Russian military personnel placed civilian psychiatrists near the front lines, to treat the soldiers who had developed “shell shock,” according to Richard A. Gabriel’s book No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War. The Russian psychiatrists confirmed much of what the Lakota had intuited: It was best for the soldiers to rehabilitate not in isolation but amid others, almost always from their warrior class. The psychiatrists talked with these soldiers near the front, for days or weeks if necessary. Many Russian soldiers then rejoined their units, Gabriel writes. (Americans began using such forward treatment, as Gabriel describes it, at the end of World War II, and it remains common today.)
When it comes to the modern science of PTSD, research has only recently asked the more basic question of why it happens and to whom and when. Charles Marmar, a psychology professor at New York University, has followed police officers from the academy through their first years on the streets, trying to determine whether some cops are at increased risk of developing PTSD. So far Marmar has found that officers who experienced childhood trauma, or hold a negative view of the world, or have only a few years on the force, are more likely to develop PTSD. (He also found no correlation between PTSD and intelligence.)
(Cont'd)
Richard :munchin
Who will get PTSD?
Paul Kix, DMN, 13 Jul 2012
Part 1 of 2
If the day was pleasant, and even when it wasn’t, the two boys would march themselves into the forest, in the shadow of the Black Hills in South Dakota, and hunt. They were no more than 8 at the time, so they took BB guns — all their parents allowed them — and looked for small game, squirrels mostly. The challenge of it turned the boys, Brian Baldwin and his cousin Chuck, into sportsmen and then best friends.
After high school, Chuck went off to Vietnam as a helicopter gunner. Brian started college and joined the ROTC on campus. By the time he got his commission and completed flight school to be a Medevac pilot, the war was almost over.
Nevertheless, Brian’s military career took off: He found that he loved the officer’s life. Chuck, though, struggled. He came home from the war quick to anger, and he drank too much, moved around a lot and watched his marriage dissolve. When Brian saw him around the holidays, Chuck would want to talk about the war. Brian always switched the subject.
One night in the 1980s in his home in Rapid City, S.D., Chuck drank too much again. Only this time, before he passed out, he pointed a gun at himself. When he pulled the trigger, he left behind a second wife and a young son — just a few years removed from his first hunting trip.
Post-traumatic stress disorder soon entered the public lexicon. What haunted Brian were the signs he missed. He wished he’d pulled more bottles away from Chuck or talked with him when he wanted to discuss the war. Chuck was isolated back in South Dakota, Brian realized, with no one around him who knew the military, the images he’d seen.
Brian never forgot that. In 1998, after 25 years, Brian retired from the Army. He ultimately took a job as a project manager at the University of Texas Imaging Research Center, which scanned the brains of people who suffered from PTSD. “I wanted to make up for my own failings,” he says.
He wanted to know why Chuck could be affected by Vietnam in ways other vets weren’t. He wanted to know, in short, if it would be clinically possible to predict who would develop PTSD.
He met with Michael Telch, a professor of psychology at the school. Telch was intrigued by Brian’s idea but knew its limitations. It wasn’t easy to do a before-and-after study of trauma. In the civilian population, it was impossible to guess when a person would live through something traumatic. In the military, some leaders didn’t even believe in PTSD; the last thing they wanted were civilian academics questioning soldiers.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan changed that. Or rather, the veterans returning from those wars and the nearly one in five Vietnam vets who had suffered, or still suffered, from PTSD provided irrefutable proof that the military needed to look for ways to treat the condition.
Brian had spent part of his career at nearby Fort Hood, and in 2007 he and Telch approached Army leaders at the base about a study. Telch wanted to put soldiers through a battery of tests before they deployed, have them fill out online journals during their tour, and then follow them for a time after they had returned to the States.
Fort Hood agreed. Telch ran his tests and, once the soldiers had come home and he could analyze his results, found something intriguing: If soldiers exhibited certain physical and emotional characteristics before deployment, they were more likely to suffer from PTSD after it. As Brian Baldwin would have hoped, it appears as though PTSD can be predicted.
Telch’s work is part of a provocative new strand of PTSD research, using modern psychology and computer science to unlock why and when a traumatic experience can derail a life. These studies — not just in military but civilian populations, too, testing cops and other first responders — hold the potential to transform our understanding of PTSD, changing it from an enigmatic and disruptive affliction that crashes over some people but not others, to a condition that can actually be predicted, quantified and prepared for.
While it sounds promising, the new research also raises ethical questions: If it becomes possible to screen enlistees for their vulnerability to PTSD, is it fair to keep some out of combat and send in others, especially in an all-volunteer military where every solider has raised his or her hand to take the same risks? If you send these potentially troubled enlistees to war anyway, what is your liability for any harm they do to themselves afterward? Or to others?
Telch says he and his researchers have measured soldiers “in all sorts of things that haven’t really been looked at in a prospective study.”
Even if a test is developed, some PTSD experts question whether we should screen soldiers at all. To do so could create the impression that battle trauma is something orderly, even manageable, when war itself is chaos and the consequences of facing combat uncontrollable. To screen soldiers for PTSD, some experts believe, is to pretend war is something it’s not.
PTSD may be a relatively new phrase, but the problem it describes is as old as any history of war. In The Iliad, for instance, after the great warrior Achilles hears that a friend has died while fighting in his place, he scoops dirt into his hands and pours it over his body; he pulls out his hair; he says, “Nothing matters to me now.” In a rage, he finds Hector, the man who killed his friend, and spears him through the neck. He then ties the body to his chariot and drags the corpse through the streets. What Achilles endures — the torture of knowing that his life came at the expense of his friend’s death — is “also the story of many combat veterans, from Vietnam and other long wars,” writes Jonathan Shay, a former psychiatrist at Boston’s Department of Veteran Affairs Outpatient Clinic, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007 for examining psychological trauma in The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Though it may not have gone by the name PTSD, other cultures in other times have acknowledged it and tried to treat it. Many Native American tribes, for instance, held initiation ceremonies for warriors at every stage of their lives, says Edward Tick, a clinical psychotherapist who is training Army chaplains in dealing with PTSD. “In Lakota tribes,” Tick says, “PTSD was called something that meant ‘The spirits left him.’” The tribe comforted the warrior for days or weeks and held a ceremony when they felt he had regained his equilibrium.
Russia is seen as the first modern society to treat psychological wounds. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905, Russian military personnel placed civilian psychiatrists near the front lines, to treat the soldiers who had developed “shell shock,” according to Richard A. Gabriel’s book No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War. The Russian psychiatrists confirmed much of what the Lakota had intuited: It was best for the soldiers to rehabilitate not in isolation but amid others, almost always from their warrior class. The psychiatrists talked with these soldiers near the front, for days or weeks if necessary. Many Russian soldiers then rejoined their units, Gabriel writes. (Americans began using such forward treatment, as Gabriel describes it, at the end of World War II, and it remains common today.)
When it comes to the modern science of PTSD, research has only recently asked the more basic question of why it happens and to whom and when. Charles Marmar, a psychology professor at New York University, has followed police officers from the academy through their first years on the streets, trying to determine whether some cops are at increased risk of developing PTSD. So far Marmar has found that officers who experienced childhood trauma, or hold a negative view of the world, or have only a few years on the force, are more likely to develop PTSD. (He also found no correlation between PTSD and intelligence.)
(Cont'd)