Fractured Futures, Failing Marriages


By John T. McDonald, Guest columnist


To say the life-threatening rigors of war create stressful changes and adjustments for young families is such a tame phrase.


It doesn’t begin to touch the range of rancor and rage that can eat away at the lifestyles upon which a marriage was initially joined because essential meanings and perspectives have been roughly altered without being thoroughly understood, let alone examined.


Indeed, one of the causes of disrupted marriages among military personnel can be the inability or the unwillingness to verbalize basic challenges to formerly comfortable inner beliefs, habits or customs and share them with an intimate other. These stresses come about due to having to live day-to-day in a constantly on-duty environment that is devoid of our normal, safe, social expectations.


Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the name given to a constellation of symptoms that may present early, but usually later, in a person’s life following sudden or persistent harsh threats or injury experienced on the battlefield.


At one time, it was called “shell shock,” later, “battle fatigue.” Treatments varied. None were 100 percent successful.


Some manifestations are relatively mild, others are definitely disruptive and can be awkward, even dangerous, to others.


For instance, it may be difficult to explain to a wife why her man avoids going out anywhere there may be fireworks simulating explosions of a real battlefield, or, while at a calm social gathering, for him to hit the deck, fearing too-well recalled incoming automatic gunfire when it is merely backfires from a passing auto. With PTSD, the ex-soldier thinks he is being attacked and instantly goes into reptile-brain, self-preservation mode.


It is often a frustrating effort to encourage the veteran to seek professional therapy. This is usually difficult to implement because of the myth perpetuated by some superiors in the military that to acknowledge mental stress is evidence of artifice or a sign of weakness, either of which is “unmanly.”


Such guilt trips are not in the best interests of a truly effective and functioning military wherever assigned. The syndrome is hard enough to diagnose. No judgmental complications to further muddy the waters are needed. Uninformed, ignorant attitudes are not just stupid, they are essentially evil.


Among the 460 congressional hearings on Capitol Hill since January, at least one touched upon hospital care and treatment for returning soldiers experiencing PTSD. This is encouraging.


Even more recently, according to a separate report, some hope is emerging for treatment by oral medication. Early laboratory testing is under way. It literally helps people with PTSD to slowly forget or integrate any massive visceral experience so that life can more rapidly return to normal in civilian surroundings. Such a pill may be years away, but there may be some hope for fractured futures and failing marriages among our military.


That is, of course, if our society does not abuse the use of yet another pill.


Source: The Joplin Globe, MO