Quotes About PTSD

There are times when the best medication and therapist simply can't help a soldier suffering from this new generation of peacekeeping injury. The anger, the rage, the hurt, and the cold loneliness that separates you from your family, friends, and society's normal daily routine are so powerful that the option of destroying yourself is both real and attractive.

I had severe PTSD and anxiety, but it was the '80s, and I didn't have a name for it. I don't think my mother even thought, like, 'Maybe I should take her to therapy.' I thought I could handle it because I'm tough.

In talking with people that have experienced it, I learned that PTSD is something that a person in a position of authority sometimes thinks they're not supposed to have. They don't always have an avenue to personally address it or even discuss it.

PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets. But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing." Israel

The much-discussed estimate of twenty-two vets a day committing suicide in the United States is deceptive: it was only in 2008 that - for the first time in decades- the suicide rate among veterans surpassed the civilian rate in America, and though each death is enormously tragic, the majority of those veterans were over the age of fifty. Many were Vietnam vets and, generally speaking, the more time that passes after a trauma, the less likely a suicide is to have anything to do with it.

Northern European societies are among the few where people sleep alone or with a partner in a private room, and that may have significant implications for mental health in general and for PTSD in particular. Virtually all mammals seem to benefit from companionship; even lab rats recover more quickly from trauma if they are caged with other rats rather than alone. In humans, lack of social support has been found to be twice as reliable at predicting PTSD as the severity of the trauma itself.

Multiple studies, including a 2007 analysis from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, found that a person's chance of getting chronic PTSD is in great part a function of their experiences before going to war. Statistically, the 20 percent of people who fail to overcome trauma tend to be those who are already burdened by psychological issues, either because they inherited them or because they suffered abuse as children.

PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets. But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing.

Killing seems to traumatize people regardless of the danger they're in or the perceived righteousness of their cause. Pilots of unmanned drones, who watch their missiles kill human beings by remote camera, have been calculated to have the same PTSD rates as pilots who fly actual combat missions in war zones.

Since only 10 percent of our armed forces experience actual combat, the majority of vets claiming to suffer from PTSD seem to have been affected by something other than direct exposure to danger.

No soldier ever really survives a war.

The symptomatology of PTSD. In PTSD a traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one's past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims. Again and again they relieve the life-threatening experiences they suffered, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring. PTSD is a complex psychobiological condition.

PTSD is, really, all about losing control. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to prioritize reclaiming and increasing a client's sense of control over his or her body, mind, therapy situation, and life. Judith Herman

As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences.

Avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.

Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD.

The strong version of the adversity hypothesis might be true, but only if we add caveats: For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).

Thoughts of suicide are common symptoms of combat PTSD. Paradoxically, they are also signs of life. If a person enters the zombielike state of indifference beyond despair, rage, suicidality, and fear, he or she simply dies. This is the testimony of concentration camp survivors and combat veterans. The ability to kill oneself is the bottom line of human freedom. Many combat veterans think daily of suicide. Knowledge that one has this freedom seems to be sustaining.

If I sleep for more than half an hour, I get horrible dreams in which I'm firing a gun and helicopters are coming down.

My dad was in the Second World War with General Patton. He won medals for bravery, but he came home quite damaged, so he was a handful. He told us some terrible stories, and I guess you'd say he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

My father fought behind Japanese lines in the second world war and it traumatised him. Everybody who knew him from before said he was the life and soul of the party - fun to be with - but after the war he was different.

You cannot get PTSD from reading a book or from hearing a story, even repeated stories over and over.

I have PTSD from all the reporters coming in over the years.

They say that it's rare, and for the longest time, I felt alone being a victim of TSS. It not only left physical wounds but mental ones. I battled PTSD and fell into a dark depression after what happened. I melted into my bed, and life just sort of stopped.