How Has PTSD Changed You?

Camp Books 122 rocket strike on bunker Tet 1968

(from the S-2 Report Newsletter by Dennis Latham)

How has PTSD changed you?

  I have long term PTSD. I don’t drink and I’ve never done drugs. I have to maintain iron control and always be ready to defend my perimeter. I’m most at ease around other combat vets. Combat vets are my extended family.

  I can’t go to bed until I’ve checked the perimeter and set the alarm. I refuse to be ambushed. My dog stays up all night on 100% alert. I would sleep a lot less if she wasn’t there to stand watch. When I wake up, I’m up fast and fully alert. I’ve trained myself to respond within a few seconds.

  Strangers are like objects to me. If threatened, I would try to avoid the situation, but would feel no regrets about taking them out because in my military mind they are not human.

  I couldn’t live in a crowded subdivision or in the city so I remain isolated. I don’t understand people who have never been in the military and don’t feel the need to have a weapon. I guess that’s a carefree way to live, but from my viewpoint, not very realistic. If something happens, they will be the first to suffer because they can’t protect themselves. I have a weapon within reach anywhere I go in my house: guns, swords, hatchets, knives.

  Before I was married and had heavy curtains, I taped dark garbage bags over many of my downstairs living room windows. I couldn’t sit in that room at night on the lower floors just knowing someone could see inside and possibly ambush me. I know this may seem crazy, but this was the way I had to live at the time.

  I’ve known others who are more extreme. I knew a Nam vet in Alaska who had a shooting range in his living room. I have a range in my yard. I like to go shooting with my Nam vet Marine friend Rocky. I feel comfortable around him.

  We all deal with PTSD in our own way. It’s unfortunate that many combat veterans deal with PTSD by alcohol and drug addiction. When that’s added to anti-depressants, often mixed all together, the results can be deadly.

  The worse thing I face with PTSD, despite thinking about Vietnam each day, is knowing that I’m a different person than I could have been had the war not intruded on my life. I look at the few old pictures of myself from before the war, and I don’t even remember that guy.

  I could see the change years later in the few pictures I had from Vietnam, taken well into my tour. I looked different. My eyes looked almost hollow, like there was nothing behind them or I was hiding something from the camera. I had changed forever. Time marched on, but inside, I still struggle to find the person I was before the war.

PTSD and Sleep

Less Sleep Helps PTSD? 

  In a new study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health in Tokyo were interested in the relationship between sleep deprivation and fear associated with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a serious disorder where, after some type of traumatic event (combat, natural disaster, abuse, etc) involving the threat of injury or death, the person can suffer from a debilitating anxiety disorder that involves:

a heightened sense of awareness
(insomnia)
reliving the event
(nightmares)
avoidance of things that remind them of the event
(movies, sounds, crowds)

guilt about their survival
(imagining the event to a different outcome)


In this experiment, researchers had two groups of healthy volunteers. Everyone watched a film with traumatic content and then one group was able to go to sleep, while the other was forced to stay awake for 24 hours (total sleep deprivation). Amazingly the group that had to stay awake had less measured fear of the film content than the group that got to sleep.

The researchers hypothesized that a case of sleep deprivation, like acute insomnia after a life threatening trauma, may help people not form the fearful memories of the traumatic event. Not long ago I blogged about sleep and memory. More specifically, we know that rapid eye movement sleep ( aka REM sleep) is when we see a good portion of the mental restoration that goes on in the brain. This is the time when we move information from our short term memory into our long term memory, and organize our thoughts in such a way that they can help us recall information later on. Could it be that with total sleep deprivation the brain is not allowed to form a long term memory of an event? While this may be possible, more research is certainly needed to better understand this complex situation.

 

PTSD: Filing A Claim Without A Diagnosis

If I want to file a claim, do I have to have a diagnosis first before I can file?

  Some service organizations will tell veterans they have to have a written diagnosis from a doctor before they can file a claim for any condition. This is not true. A veteran can file a claim at any time for any condition related to military service. You do not have to prove it before you file, and a service organization cannot refuse to let you open a claim.

  Many service officers seem to be in it for the job and don’t care about helping veterans or they don’t want to make waves with the VA. The VA pays for their office space at the hospitals, and more and more I hear veterans complain that service officers often seem to side with the VA. If a service officer, from any service organization mandated by Congress to help veterans, tells you that you should stop whining and be happy with what you have...or if they tell you that if you file for an increase in PTSD that you risk losing your percentage...then tell them you are going over their head to DC, where most of the home offices are located.

  Don’t let anyone try to make you feel like you are a bother because you want to file a claim for something that happened on active duty. And don’t forget the elected officials. Your Congressman or Senator know that helping veterans through inquiries makes them look good.

  If your claim has been in the system a long time, an official inquiry may help to speed it up. The main thing is to never give up when you have a good claim.