Did you know that during your military training, you where actually taught to instinctively have some aspects of PTSD? People here have often said to me that when they went looking across the web for PTSD related content or communities, they are normally vastly about veterans, military and combat related persons who suffer PTSD, with little scope for everyone else who suffer this dreaded disorder. The reason that some people highlight military PTSD, and generally without even knowing it, is because those who have endured combat experience often suffer more of the symptoms on a daily basis vs. someone who may off been abused as a child, involved in an accident or raped even. Now,
DO NOT get me wrong here, I am a firm believer that all PTSD is equal, and I maintain that attitude.
The difference that is assimilated with veterans and civilian PTSD is that military members normally suffer more symptoms daily than those of other reasons. Now take special note of my highlight, "normally suffer more symptoms daily", not always, but generally do. This has nothing to do with the intensity of each persons symptoms with PTSD as such, as a person who was raped may suffer anxiety at extreme levels, depression and social disorders to the point of being scared to leave their home in fear of being attacked again, where a veteran will often suffer more symptoms, but not neccessarily at a higher intensity each day.
The reason that military veterans and those in combat roles suffer more symptoms is because of the training they have received. When in basic training, your taught to eat, sleep, walk, talk, run, drill, weapons, etc etc to the level that it is instinctive, and you don't have to think about doing these actions, they are just natural. Military persons will generally eat faster than a person without military training, because of the very initial training endured, that teaches you to eat quick and continue on. Why? Because you need to survive on the battlefield, and you don't have the luxury of taking your time to eat, nor do you have the luxury not to eat, or else you fall down and become a casuality.
Its all about your alertness level, and your ability to switch from inactive to active at command from a superior. A normal civilians alertness levels are low, compared to a military members. The simple reason for this, is that military don't have the time to hype a soldier up as such, take them from low to high, which takes a lot of time to achieve, where as being pre-programmed as such, leaves a much lesser effort upon the military in time of need. What this pre-programming does, is places those with military training at a level to be dropped into battle and ready to fight, with low levels of soldiers breaking down, and being scared as such. This level eleviates the natural human emotion of being scared, and places a soldier in a state of readiness, that when andrenalin kicks in, the soldier will continue to fight, kill the enemy, without hesitation, without question. This isn't an isolated training technique, in that it works in conjunction with other tactics we are programmed with, being mateship, look after your buddy, work as a team, don't let the team down, etc etc. When dropped into combat, nobody dare let down their buddy, their mate, thus they fight whether they want too or not, adrenalin kicks in and takes over.
If you dropped a civilian into a war zone, they would run the other way. Australian soldiers are always trained to fight into where the shots come from, or the threat as such. This is what makes Australian soldiers instinctively run towards a threat, opposed to running away from it. Army is more prevalent than other services because of the nature of being the combat soldier, opposed to Air Force or Naval personnel. Regardless what country, all Army soldiers are pre-programmed to an extent for this exact conflict, thus they are trained to have certain symptoms of PTSD, being:
Arousal Symptoms:- Sleep disturbance (trained to sleep lightly, wakeup constantly for piquets and duties)
- Anger and irritability (bayonet fighting, hand to hand combat)
- Concentration problems (black or white thinking, no inbetween)
- Constantly on the look-out for signs of danger (patrolling, scouting, sentries, enemy awareness, etc)
- Jumpy, easily startled (quick reaction to noise, events or incidents, immediate turn into the direction)
Emotions
- No remorse for the enemy
- Trained to kill
- Show no emotions, be strong, fight through
Have a look at the
post traumatic stress disorder symptoms for yourself, and without looking at PTSD, look at what symptoms are actually because of military training, or more to the point, are heightened because of your military training.
If you had a level to gauge alertness, readiness and vigilence from 0 - 10, a civilian would be around (1 - 2), where a soldier is actually programmed to sit around the (7) mark, and are basically paused as such, until needed for active duty, at which time your level is raised to (9 - 10). On completion of active duty, you are relaxed back to a (7) again. The problem is, is that when you leave the military, you are never deprogrammed as such, you are never lowered back to a suitable alertness and vigilance level. This is also two fold, in that if the military ever required your services again under war time treaties, they can call on you with little training to raise that alert level to fight again.
Interesting, but factually true. This is why soldiers tend to suffer more symptoms of PTSD on a daily basis than those civilian equivalents who have PTSD, though don't suffer many symptoms at once, more just the main symptoms.