Sally Satel: The Battle Over Battle Fatigue
[Sally Satel is a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.]
Military history is rich with tales of warriors who return from battle with the horrors of war still raging in their heads. One of the earliest known observations was made by the Greek historian Herodotus, who described an Athenian warrior struck blind "without blow of sword or dart" when a soldier standing next to him was killed. The classic term—"shell shock"—dates to World War I; "battle fatigue," "combat exhaustion" and "war stress" were used in Word War II.
Modern psychiatry calls these invisible wounds post-traumatic stress disorder. And along with this diagnosis, which became widely known in the wake of the Vietnam War, has come a new sensitivity to the causes and consequences of being afflicted with it.
Veterans with unrelenting PTSD can receive disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. As retired Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, secretary of Veterans Affairs, said last week, the mental injuries of war "can be as debilitating as any physical battlefield trauma." The occasion for his remark was a new VA rule allowing veterans to receive disability benefits for PTSD if, as non-combatants, they had good reason to fear hostile activity, such as firefights or explosions. In other words, veterans can now file a benefits claim for being traumatized by events they did not actually experience....
The story of PTSD starts with the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, a band of self-described antiwar psychiatrists—led by Chaim Shatan and Robert Jay Lifton, who was well known for his work on the psychological damage wrought by Hiroshima—formulated a new diagnostic concept to describe the psychological wounds that the veterans sustained in the war. They called it "Post-Vietnam Syndrome," a disorder marked by "growing apathy, cynicism, alienation, depression, mistrust, and expectation of betrayal as well as an inability to concentrate, insomnia, nightmares, restlessness, uprootedness, and impatience with almost any job or course of study." Not uncommonly, Messrs. Shatan and Lifton said, the symptoms did not emerge until months or years after the veterans returned home....
Read entire article at WSJ
Military history is rich with tales of warriors who return from battle with the horrors of war still raging in their heads. One of the earliest known observations was made by the Greek historian Herodotus, who described an Athenian warrior struck blind "without blow of sword or dart" when a soldier standing next to him was killed. The classic term—"shell shock"—dates to World War I; "battle fatigue," "combat exhaustion" and "war stress" were used in Word War II.
Modern psychiatry calls these invisible wounds post-traumatic stress disorder. And along with this diagnosis, which became widely known in the wake of the Vietnam War, has come a new sensitivity to the causes and consequences of being afflicted with it.
Veterans with unrelenting PTSD can receive disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. As retired Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, secretary of Veterans Affairs, said last week, the mental injuries of war "can be as debilitating as any physical battlefield trauma." The occasion for his remark was a new VA rule allowing veterans to receive disability benefits for PTSD if, as non-combatants, they had good reason to fear hostile activity, such as firefights or explosions. In other words, veterans can now file a benefits claim for being traumatized by events they did not actually experience....
The story of PTSD starts with the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, a band of self-described antiwar psychiatrists—led by Chaim Shatan and Robert Jay Lifton, who was well known for his work on the psychological damage wrought by Hiroshima—formulated a new diagnostic concept to describe the psychological wounds that the veterans sustained in the war. They called it "Post-Vietnam Syndrome," a disorder marked by "growing apathy, cynicism, alienation, depression, mistrust, and expectation of betrayal as well as an inability to concentrate, insomnia, nightmares, restlessness, uprootedness, and impatience with almost any job or course of study." Not uncommonly, Messrs. Shatan and Lifton said, the symptoms did not emerge until months or years after the veterans returned home....