They Don'T Come Back The Same

It is a straightforward axiom that soldiers do not come back the same when returning from war. This has enormous implications for the thousands of men and women fighting for their countries all around the globe; that they may too come home with the disorder becoming more prevalent within today's society: post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Trauma occurs when a person has experienced, witnessed or been confronted with a terrible event. This occurs most often when soldiers return from war. In World War One this was described as shell shock. World War Two saw it described as battle fatigue. Since then other terms used to de-scribe PTSD include nostalgia, not yet diagnosed nervous, irritable heart, effort syndrome, war neu-rosis, and operational exhaustion. All relate to the same group of symptoms which together form post traumatic stress disorder.

Medically speaking, PTSD is a "dysfunction of the bodies normal defence systems to traumatic expe-riences". This abnormal function produces symp-toms through forms of re-experiencing the trauma, persistent avoidance and depression.

Individuals can be subjected to distressing recol-lections of the experience through forms of flash-backs or nightmares. It is not uncommon for people while having these flashbacks to return to the frame of mind they were in when the incident took place, forcing the individual to not only be reliving the thoughts but also the physical reactions, such as sweating and an increased heart rate.

Persistent avoidance can be emotionally created by the sufferer to prevent thoughts that reminds them of the traumatic event. This can have a de-vastating effect on their entire life. Reduced inter-est in hobbies, detachment from others and a re-stricted range of feelings are just some of the ways persistent avoidance, because of PTSD, can affect an individual.

The third category is depression. This term is used broadly to encompass symptoms including sleep disturbances, irritability, outbursts of anger, diffi-culty concentrating, increased vigilance and exag-gerated responses to others.

One of the most difficult symptoms of PTSD to deal with is survival guilt, feeling guilty because they survived while others did not. This is seen as it occurs in all wars - not just the spectacularly devastating conflicts involving explosions or horrific incidents, but in all forms of combat.

Officer Gary Martin served with the Australian Defence Force in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam and devoted his entire post-soldier life to sharing his experiences with health workers and working to-gether with psychiatrists and psychologists to be able to provide better services to veterans suffer-ing from PTSD.

Martin describes survival guilt as the "most illogical, yet frequent" symptom of PTSD. He acknowledges the reasoning behind this guilt as it is clear that during the course of war, soldiers will perform actions that they are not proud of and that the rationale of "doing our duty" does not always do suffice to remove the guilt.

Survival guilt is depicted as illogical for the guilt may be based on a situation where there was nothing the individual could have done to prevent the tragedy taking place.

Commonly the survivor experiencing the survival guilt symptom of PTSD will repeatedly ask them-selves, "Why did I survive?"