Breaking Point by Rebecca Schwartz Greene;

Author:Rebecca Schwartz Greene;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

PTSD

As did Menninger, many psychiatrists shied away from recognizing that soldiers with war experience might sustain long-term, even permanent debilitating illness, despite significant numbers exhibiting symptoms later termed PTSD. First enumerated in the third edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1980), or DSM-III, the criteria included a “stressor,” that is, a traumatic occurrence beyond the individual’s usual experiences. The stressor had to be a rape, torture, a natural disaster, an airplane crash, or, in the case of veterans, combat. The stressor would cause symptoms within six months of the date of trauma (“acute”) or later on (“chronic or delayed”). The primary symptoms included reliving the traumatic past in one’s mind through flashbacks, dreams, or an association with a similar, current incident and withdrawal from social or sexual activity, along with other possible symptoms, including difficulty sleeping, exaggerated startle reaction, guilt about surviving, the death of someone close, memory impairment, avoiding events that reminded him or her about the trauma or, on the other hand, intensifying the symptoms by exposure to events that resembled the original stressor.21

Many from World War II had characteristics of PTSD, though it was not then recognized: They withdrew from social or sexual contact, especially in their first year home. They replayed the trauma in their minds continuously. They carried guns or knives as if still in combat. They avoided memories of combat by binging on drugs or, more frequently, alcohol. (Over 750,000 veterans were alcoholics, at a treatment cost of $750 million annually by 1947, according to Menninger. Two years later, it came close to $780 million.)22 They had suicidal or homicidal thoughts. Noise, smells, or food could trigger recollection of the trauma.23

The first studies of prisoners of war returning from Japan pointed to detachment and loss of sexual interest. By 1947, extensive psychiatric examination of thirty-five Americans subjected to three years of torture in Japanese prison of war camps found widespread mental changes. Half had impaired memory. Eight were psychopathic. Follow-ups six months and a year later revealed continuing alarm reactions, nightmares, and, particularly, distrust of others. A six-year study in 1954 found continuing psychoneuroses and psychosis among thousands of Pacific POWs, with symptoms resembling PTSD. Robert Keehn’s 1974 study of almost ten thousand psychoneurotic veterans and ten thousand controls found that psychoneurotics, twenty-six to thirty years old in 1944, who had served at least ninety days, had higher rates of homicide, suicide, alcoholism, and suicide-prone accidents, especially accidental drowning, than their normal counterparts.24 Though PTSD was not yet an official diagnosis, the media recognized behavior resembling PTSD. In one episode of the television series Streets of San Francisco (1973), a police detective, played by a young Michael Douglas, sympathetically protected a reclusive “schizoid” navy veteran, who suffered with a disability incurred from seeing all his men go down during the Japanese bombing of the battleship Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor.25

Once PTSD became official, World War II veterans were diagnosed, and, forty, fifty, even sixty or seventy years after the war,

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