The movie American Sniper has people talking about PTSD now. I recall back in the 80's people first talking (to the best of my memory) about PTSD in regards to soldiers who back from Vietnam still suffered from PTSD and it affecting theirs and their families lives.

 

Why did we not hear about reports of soldiers coming back from WWII and Korea having the same issues? Was the understanding of the mind from a psychological standpoint not far enough along to recognize such suffering? Or was society just more closed and you didn't talk about such topics outside of the house hold? I have to believe soldiers from the beginning of time have suffered from PTSD, and just assume we didn't understand it or want to talk about it.

 

What is your thoughts?

There are a ton of factors, IMO.

 

Lifestyle - Hunters/Farmers were more prevalent then. Not to say seeing a human die is the same as an animal but the gore wouldn't shock someone as much, IMO.

 

Understanding - They would classify someone as a drunk or crazy but now they have a mental illness. That's a tribute to advances in modern science.

 

News/Internet/Social Media - You would have never heard about someone going crazy when they came back from the war if it was more than 3 states away.

Culture, many troops see it as weakness. They don't want people to think they are crazy or that there is something wrong with them. They don't know how to decompress or go about finding help. In the Army, we would have monthly power point presentations on PTSD and other problems within the military or at least once a quarter in accordance to the the fiscal year. You could tell there is a difference in approach to the subject between the guys that deployed and the ones that didn't

 

With civilians, in general, I believe it is a lack of understanding what PTSD is and what it entails. There was a fellow student yesterday who did not even know what it meant. Think about it, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, it just sounds like a medical term coined by a monotoned voiced doctor. It wasn't called PTSD in the past. I believe George Carlin had a bit on this subject.

 

Shell Shocked...combat fatigue...those are terms you heard when talking WWI, WWII, etc. PTSD in my opinion is just the modern terminology used to describe the mental aftereffects of combat, but it's always been around.

I'd say it's the perception of it. Back then, mental illness had a very negative connotation. You were basically just branded crazy. Now days, society is much more accepting of the fact that their are mental illnesses and it's not nearly as negative a label. Still think it is viewed more negatively than it should be.

For reference in the thread:

 

What is Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

 

When in danger, it’s natural to feel afraid. This fear triggers many split-second changes in the body to prepare to defend against the danger or to avoid it. This “fight-or-flight” response is a healthy reaction meant to protect a person from harm. But in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this reaction is changed or damaged. People who have PTSD may feel stressed or frightened even when they’re no longer in danger.

 

PTSD develops after a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical harm. The person who develops PTSD may have been the one who was harmed, the harm may have happened to a loved one, or the person may have witnessed a harmful event that happened to loved ones or strangers.

 

PTSD was first brought to public attention in relation to war veterans, but it can result from a variety of traumatic incidents, such as mugging, rape, torture, being kidnapped or held captive, child abuse, car accidents, train wrecks, plane crashes, bombings, or natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes.

 

NIMH · Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Ever see the scene in "Patton" where he slaps the kid at the hospital? My guess is Patton wasn't the only one who engaged in such behavior when it came to shell-shocked soldiers.

 

As far as general questions on why/why not WWII soldiers experiencing PTSD — I think the fact that everyone was in the same boat in terms of shared struggle made it easier (probably not the best term for this, but it's all I got) for that generation to accept and internalize/compartmentalize what they had seen, out of a sense of duty and being part of something larger than them, with major stakes on the table if they failed their missions. And maybe those guys did talk about that stuff when they were together at their local VFW or Legion hall to help them get through their pain.

 

As far as Korea goes, those guys probably just followed the lead of the WWII guys since those wars fell so close together. Many men served tours in both wars.

 

Vietnam, perhaps, was a generational divide thing exacerbated by the political upheaval of the era. The sons of the WWII guys fought in Vietnam — that's how it was with my dad and his brother. But by the time Vietnam got into full gear, the nature of war in general had changed dramatically in terms of tactics and weapons, and the objectives were far less clear than was the case in WWII. And I don't think there's any doubt that the reaction many of the soldiers received upon their return home played into those guys suffering a lot more with their mental state than when the WWII guys got the universal heroes' welcome.

I completed a lengthy research paper during my graduate work specifically on PTSD within the military. BigVMan is correct when he refers to "shell shock", "combat fatigue" and now PTSD. PTSD is mind / body incident that occurs when stressors are continually at work on a person in a dangerous, life threatening or seemingly life threatening situation.

 

One of the more difficult mental health conditions to treat, mostly because those with PTSD have a great deal of difficulty relating to others who have not had similar or shared experiences...which most mental health counselors have not, in particular in the case of veterans.

 

The VA has come a long way since the late '80's with their care and treatment of PTSD. We have a long way to go.

 

I would encourage everyone, if so inclined, to look at supporting the Wounded Warrior Project. Not only do they deal with the physical needs of returning veterans, but they also support additional , non-traditional counseling methods such as support dogs.

 

PTSD is a very serious issue that can affect individuals many years after the trauma, the individuals may not even recognize that their behaviors are different and at times only those closest to the victims even know.

To anyone who is interested in the subject of PTSD in veterans, I would strongly, strongly recommend reading this book, written by Lt. Colonel David Grossman, a retired 20 year veteran of the US Army in the 82d Airborne. Covers a WHOLE lot of the psychology impacting soldiers past and present. Very good read.

 

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

Lt. Col. David Grossman, US Army (Ret.)

 

Well crap, I can't seem to find it but I know there are statistics out there for actual average combat time seen during war time from the civil war on up to Iraq/Afghanistan. maybe someone smarter than me can find the information. Actual average combat time a civil war soldier saw wasn't very much. WWI went up, but still not a whole lot of actual combat action, much much more downtime/non-combat time. WWII combat time increased, and so on. One of the reasons supposedly today for so much PTSD is todays combat solider sees FAR more time in the combat arena, there just very little relaxed "non alert" time, the body and mind is almost always hyped up. That HAS to have an affect on a person.

To anyone who is interested in the subject of PTSD in veterans, I would strongly, strongly recommend reading this book, written by Lt. Colonel David Grossman, a retired 20 year veteran of the US Army in the 82d Airborne. Covers a WHOLE lot of the psychology impacting soldiers past and present. Very good read.

 

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

Lt. Col. David Grossman, US Army (Ret.)

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]48806[/ATTACH]

 

Looks like someone has posted the full text of the book online (although it's not exactly the easiest thing to read...). LINK

 

There's an interesting passage about some of the natural psychology of posturing and fight or flight thought that goes into battle. The passage occurs pretty early on in the book. I found it particularly interesting. Shows how in centuries past, before militaries had developed and refined their more modern and advanced techniques for training their soldiers to actually acclimate to killing (not just firing a gun or using a weapon...but killing), that the soldiers seemed to prove themselves less likely to want to kill, even in the midst of battle.

 

 

 

 

Adding the posture and submission options to the standard fight-or-flight model of aggression response helps to explain many of the actions on the battlefield. When a man is frightened, he literally stops thinking with his forebrain (that is, with the mind of a human being) and begins to think with the midbrain (hat is, with the portion of his brain that is essentially indistinguishable from that of an animal), and in the mind of an animal it is the one who makes the loudest noise or puffs himself up the largest who will win.

 

Posturing can be seen in the plumed helmets of the ancient Greeks and Romans, which allowed the bearer to appear taller and therefore fiercer to his foe, while the brilliantly shined armor made him seem broader and brighter. Such plumage saw its height in modern history during the Napoleonic era, when soldiers wore bright uniforms and high, uncomfortable shako hats, which served no purpose other than to make the wearer look and feel like a taller, more dangerous creature.

 

...

 

With the advent of gunpowder, the soldier has been provided with one of the finest possible means of posturing. "Time and again," says Paddy Griffith, we read of regiments [in the Civil War] blazing away uncontrollably, once started, and continuing until all ammunition was gone or all enthusiasm spent. Firing was such a positive act, and gave the men such a physical release for their emotions, that instincts easily took over from training and from the exhortations of officers.

 

Gunpowder's superior noise, its superior posturing ability, made it ascendant on the battlefield. The longbow would still have been used in the Napoleonic Wars if the raw mathematics of killing effectiveness was all that mattered, since both the longbow's firing rate and its accuracy were much greater than that of a smoothbore musket. But a frightened man, thinking with his midbrain and going "ploink, ploink, ploink" with a bow, doesn't stand a chance against an equally frightened man going "BANG! BANG!" with a musket.

 

Firing a musket or rifle clearly fills the deep-seated need to posture, and it even meets the requirement of being relatively harmless when we consider the consistent historical occurrences of firing over the enemy's head, and the remarkable ineffectiveness of such fire.

 

Ardant du Picq became one of the first to document the common tendency of soldiers to fire harmlessly into the air simply for the sake of firing. Du Picq made one of the first thorough investigations into the nature of combat with a questionnaire distributed to French officers in the 1860s. One officer's response to du Picq stated quite frankly that "a good many soldiers fired into the air at long distances," while another observed that "a certain number of our soldiers fired almost in the air, without aiming, seeming to want to stun themselves, to become drunk on rifle fire during this gripping crisis."

 

Paddy Griffith joins du Picq in observing that soldiers in battle have a desperate urge to fire their weapons even when (perhaps especially when) they cannot possibly do the enemy any harm.

 

Griffith notes: Even in the noted "slaughter pens" at Bloody Lane, Marye's Heights, Kennesaw, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor an attacking unit could not only come very close to the defending line, but it could also stay there for hours — and indeed for days — at a time. Civil War musketry did not therefore possess the power to kill large numbers of men, even in very dense formations, at long range. At short range it could and did kill large numbers, but not very quickly [emphasis added].

 

Griffith estimates that the average musket fire from a Napoleonic or Civil War regiment (usually numbering between two hundred and one thousand men) firing at an exposed enemy regiment at an average range of thirty yards, would usually result in hitting only one or two men per minute! Such firefights "dragged on until exhaustion set in or nightfall put an end to hostilities. Casualties mounted because the contest went on so long, not because the fire was particularly deadly."

 

Thus we see that the fire of the Napoleonic- and Civil War-era soldier was incredibly ineffective. This does not represent a failure on the part of the weaponry. John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book Soldiers tell us of a Prussian experiment in the late 1700s in which an infantry battalion fired smoothbore muskets at a target one hundred feet long by six feet high, representing an enemy unit, which resulted in 25 percent hits at 225 yards, 40 percent hits at 150 yards, and 60 percent hits at 75 yards. This represented the potential killing power of such a unit. The reality is demonstrated at the Battle of Belgrade in 1717, when "two Imperial battalions held their fire until their Turkish opponents were only thirty paces away, but hit only thirty-two Turks when they fired and were promptly overwhelmed."

 

Sometimes the fire was completely harmless, as Benjamin Mclntyre observed in his firsthand account of a totally bloodless nighttime firefight at Vicksburg in 1863. "It seems strange wrote Mclntyre, "that a company of men can fire volley after volley at a like number of men at not over a distance of fifteen steps and not cause a single casualty. Yet such was the facts in this instance." The musketry of the black-powder era was not always so ineffective, but over and over again the average comes out to only one or two men hit per minute with musketry.

 

(Cannon fire, like machine-gun fire in World War II, is an entirely different matter, sometimes accounting for more than 50 percent of the casualties on the black-powder battlefield, and artillery fire has consistently accounted for the majority of combat casualties in this century. This is largely due to the group processes at work in a cannon, machine-gun, or other crew-served-weapons firing. This subject is addressed in detail later in this book in the section entitled "An Anatomy of Killing.")

 

Muzzle-loading muskets could fire from one to five shots per minute, depending on the skill of the operator and the state of the weapon. With a potential hit rate of well over 50 percent at the average combat ranges of this era, the killing rate should have been hundreds per minute, instead of one or two. The weak fink between the killing potential and the killing capability of these units was the soldier. The simple fact is that when faced with a living, breathing opponent instead of a target, a significant majority of the soldiers revert to a posturing mode in which they fire over their enemy's heads.

 

Richard Holmes, in his superb book Acts of War, examines the hit rates of soldiers in a variety of historical battles. At Rorkes Drift in 1897 a small group of British soldiers were surrounded and vastly outnumbered by the Zulu. Firing volley after volley into the massed enemy ranks at point-blank range, it seems as if no round could have possibly missed, and even a 50 percent hit rate would seem to be low. But Holmes estimates that in actuality approximately thirteen rounds were fired for each hit.

For reference in the thread:

 

What is Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

 

When in danger, it’s natural to feel afraid. This fear triggers many split-second changes in the body to prepare to defend against the danger or to avoid it. This “fight-or-flight” response is a healthy reaction meant to protect a person from harm. But in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), this reaction is changed or damaged. People who have PTSD may feel stressed or frightened even when they’re no longer in danger.

 

PTSD develops after a terrifying ordeal that involved physical harm or the threat of physical harm. The person who develops PTSD may have been the one who was harmed, the harm may have happened to a loved one, or the person may have witnessed a harmful event that happened to loved ones or strangers.

 

PTSD was first brought to public attention in relation to war veterans, but it can result from a variety of traumatic incidents, such as mugging, rape, torture, being kidnapped or held captive, child abuse, car accidents, train wrecks, plane crashes, bombings, or natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes.

 

NIMH · Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

 

I would wager you've encountered this on both sides of the badge.

Marvin Lewis would blame it on the media.

I have to wonder if the greatest generation experienced a warmer reception and friendlier and more appreciative country full of folks upon their return than the mass of ignorant jackwagons that we often see protesting and berating vets from Vietnam going forward.

I have to wonder if the greatest generation experienced a warmer reception and friendlier and more appreciative country full of folks upon their return than the mass of ignorant jackwagons that we often see protesting and berating vets from Vietnam going forward.

 

Pretty sure that's a commonly known fact, dude. Historical evidence, and such.