Thank you, that helps me understand much better things you have said here and in the past.

Does that mean the bait caught August?

You're welcome!

It is a career choice ....nothing more.
In particular because the guy went for mercenary and so on.
So if he did not join the army it all would not happen to him.
Some people would not be alcoholics if not exposed to booze or shoot themselves due to financial risks taken or overall displeasure with life..

If it was like that i would live in a country of nut cases....some may argue that i do:haha: but actually people with respectful service are usually also quite successful in life and careers.
Maybe some armies are better with character judgments but for that you need vast pool of volunteers to have the choice to begin with.:hmmm:



.................

Everyone who has seen combat has been "wounded".

Been quite a while since I last seen that or something very similar :hmmm:

A climb in suicide rates of active US army personell is reported again. By that count, the losses from suicides are higher than losses suffered in combat again.

The number would be even higher if also counting those suicides commited by veterans who no longer are in service and that the Pentagon thus loves to describe as unrelated to war deployments during service time.

The total numbers are constantly rising since a decade despite attempts to tackle them by increased options for personell to ask for help.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2...icide-war.html

Your eyes see war, your soul pays a price. Always.

I read today elsewhere, that the number of suicides in the US miltary has overtaken the numbers killed in combat.
http://www.spiegel.de/politik/auslan...-a-837659.html
There's not much to add - the "trauma" (also a nice latin word for being wounded) exists.


- I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."

- "War is old men talking and young men dying"

(McCain (?))

Post Traumatic stress disorder or shock shell, pff just names, who cares about names or the crap posted by leftist crapnews like "Der Spiegel".
I suffer from PTSD and was retired in 1997 due to medical reasons (aka unfit for further service).
To fight my insomnia i need Trimipramine (150 mg) and in the morning i must take Mirtazapine (50mg).
Nevertheless i still sleep with lights on in my room, mostly with hardest nightmares when i sleep at all.
Many times i woke up, and had vomitted my bedding while dreaming.
My GF sleeps in a seperate bed because i can't sleep with another person even in the same room.
After all those years i still can't go to overcrowed place like public viewings during the Football World Championship etc. Even going to a supermarket full with people makes me shivering and sweat like hell.
Over the years i learned to avoid situations or places which could casue Falshbacks.

But what i "like" the most are comments by Monday morning quarterbacks and armchair generals like "get over it" or even better "everything will be fine again"
Everything will be fine again my arse.

The experience i made is that nothing is kept under the carpet and every Armed Service of any country does the best they can do for the men/women which are suffering from PTSD or any other kind of battle trauma.

Thanks for sharing your pain, Kongo Otto. So many people from so many walks of life suffer the emotional effects of trauma. At least modern society recognizes and tries to help those who suffer from PTSD, at least here in America the Veteran's Administration is dedicated to trying to help.

Has your doctor considered a possible causal link between vomitting and taking Trimizapine? Gastro-intestinal problems are a known sideeffect of Trimi.

Both medications have a generally dampening effect, and I am sure you already know that taking such drugs only deals with symptoms and neurologic interfaces, not with the symptoms' psychic causes. This is not meant to minimise this value of theirs, I know that it can make all the difference between a life that can be handled, and a life that gets out of control.

I wish you to have found company and assistance in form of somebody understanding this, who is capable to handle you nevertheless despite you maybe being "difficult".

Psychotherapy will or will not help you, I do not judge that from outside and from the distance. But I know that people having to deal with endlessly running memories of somethign bad and traumatising sometimes find relief when withdrawing their lives away from the crowded, people-rich places like towns and cities, and seek to start a new life in the countryside, in nature, distanced from other people. I mean that as an active decision, not just as a reaction you feel urged to obey like you do when avoiding crowds and public events - I mean the difference between chosen retreat and mere avoidance behavior. The very experience of nature itself can be healing, sometimes to more sometimes to less degree. Times of chosen retreat (not fleeing into avoidance) can be helpful. Unfortunately, for the effected subject it is difficult to decide when retreating is indeed kind of therapeutically useful, and when it just tranbslate into avoidance and thus increases the pathological net effect and leads deeper into the troubles, due to unconstructive self-isolation. So, there is risk involved when going this path.

You possibly will never go back to your former life and self. But I hope you travel a path that leads you towards finding your "new" life bearable one day.

What absolute nonsense! Any child who has ever been punished by their parents has been wounded then. Anyone who has ever been pulled over for a traffic violation has been wounded then.

Your talking out your rear. Not everyone who has seen combat has PTSD or some emotional scar. Yes some things never go away. Some stressful situations change the way we look at things. That doesn't mean its a wound. You know nothing of what you speak.

K.O. - Brother, your in my prayers. Let me encourage you to see if there is a PTSD support group in your area. There are many here in the States and I strongly suggest PTSD sufferers to give it a try. It helps many.

@Skybird - Its important to understand WHY the occurances of PTSD have increased. Think back to WW2 - submariners didn't sink seamen, they sank ships. Pilots shot down planes, not pilots. Warfighters tend to disassociate as much as possible from the reality that their actions cause the deaths of people. The conflicts that have been ongoing have not allowed such disassociation. You can make a ship or a plane "impersonal" to an extent. You can't look down the barrel of a rifle and site on a person and pull the trigger and then make it impersonal.

This is why the barbarity and inhumanity of the actions of the enemy are stressed by the warfighter. Its psychologically necessary to dehumanize the enemy in some way. Given the problem of seperating the civilian from the combatant, more and more of the symptoms displayed are of the type described by K.O. - the struggle to deal with places where there are lots of people - for example. Its like those who need to sit in a corner at a restaurant just so they can see everyone.

PTSD is real. Many militaries and countries do indeed take it seriously, and try to help those who suffer from it. Could it be done better? Everything like this can be "done better" - but don't think the effort isn't there.

I think the ral dimension of the problem is hidden from the public to give the wars they decide to fight a nicier face. I also think that in an army that is at war and where the personell pool is under stress, the priority in psychological treatement is not towards ehaling but to ensure usability in a combat environment again. In fact over the past years this has been reported in documentaries several times in case oif the US army.

Not everybody seeing the dying and destruction in war or experiencing the sensual environment of battle, suffers immediate PTS. But I am absolutely certain that something in man breaks when seing such things. There is a scar left in the hidden, in the inside. Something breaks, leaves an invisible wound. Makes your turning into a fatalist, or a barbarian dog, or a man having lost his thunder, or having lost his sensuality, sensibility, ability to admire nature and beauty. Whatever it is, the effect inevitably is there.

I am also sure that every man has his personal total, absolute breaking point. Push him beyond that point, and some core of his soul springs into pieces like glass, leaves him diagnosed with PTS or whatever. A German politician who has lived thorugh the war, put it in just two words, in the best way I ever heared it expressed: "Krieg vertiert." (Egon Bahr).

In the end, man is a creature that wants to see meaning and sense in life, and preferrably a pösotive meaning, not just an instrumental explanation. A hunger for meaning. Don't feed that, or disapoint that craving, and you see man loosing himself. Drugs. Fatalism. Barbarism. Blindness. Just consider what Vietnam did to many GIs.

That so many people fall for religions, also is to be xplained bny that: hunger for meaning, for a sense in living, an explanation why we are here. This is imo one of the most fundamental dimensions that define the essence of being human, beside the drives of survial, and sex. And it can overcome both the latter and even can make man sacrificing himself and actively refusing the survival drive.

as a footnote: Do not forget the 'casualties' among the families (especially their children) /friends of WIA soldiers and also not of those civilians, who have to live in the conflict zone and bear the consequences.

I do not always agree with Skybird ;) but on this topic he's definitely right. I think military organizations need more transparency in general and one way to do this is to have independent reviewers. In the end this would be beneficial for all...for the military and for society.

Especially if you think that the people who join the military are often teenagers, who lack the education and experience to judge what consequences their decision will have. I think it's only fair for them to see the whole story - what it is to go to war before they make their decision.

I also do not agree on statements like 'you were never in the military, you cannot judge how it is' and that stuff. Sure you do not get the whole picture...but btw...do you really get it when you were there...have you really seen all?