PTSD: What you might not know

When a veteran recently asked Donald Trump his opinion on mental health support for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), critics homed in on one sentence of Trump’s response.

When taken out of context, his comment that veterans with PTSD can’t handle what they saw in combat merely highlights a common misconception about PTSD. Trump has always spoken highly of the U.S. military, and when taken in the full context of the interview, it was clear that his concern for veterans is steadfast.

{mosads}The goal of PTSD awareness in the military is to improve services to our veterans, provide varied treatment options and reduce stigma. In this instance, Trump went on to recognize the need for changes in the VA and to acknowledge that veterans with the disorder deserve relevant and skilled psychological care.

Learning more about this often overlooked disorder can make a real difference in the lives of our veterans, their families and anyone else who has suffered from PTSD.

A place for everything and everything in its place

You can think of the mind as a room full of file cabinets. Every experience, from the most mundane to the most incredible, gets neatly filed away. We are born with many cabinets, known as schemas; still more are formed in early childhood. Our minds are designed to learn, form attachments, fall in love and grieve, among other things, and to remember the experience in an orderly fashion.

Our minds are not designed to process the horrors of war — evolutionarily speaking, there is no reason to expect that they should be. When a person doesn’t have a mental file for a particular experience, it can bounce around in the mind, looking for a place to be put away. These unsettled memories flashing past our consciousness are why two of the main symptoms of PTSD are flashbacks and nightmares. It is also why people with PTSD struggle with feeling isolated, irritable and agitated.

PTSD goes beyond being solely an emotional experience and can lead to significant physical changes in the brain, particularly in the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory function and distinguishing between past and present events. Timely intervention can mitigate these changes, further supporting the need for accurate screening and effective care.

PTSD does not happen because of mental or emotional weakness. People who witness horrible events without developing PTSD are not stronger. It’s not a competition. People with PTSD are having a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.  

Going forward

Treatment options for PTSD are numerous and varied. What works for one person might not work for the next. The most helpful approach is a unique blend of traditional clinical interventions with supportive therapies like meditation, spiritual development and exercise.

From a treatment standpoint, the goal of therapy for PTSD is very different from many other mental health issues. The goal is not to help people make sense of what happened or come to some tidy resolution about it. When it comes to PTSD, insight is a waste of time because the fact is that something inconceivably terrible has happened. There is no need to search for the root cause. The first goal of therapy for those suffering from PTSD is to help them create a place for those the memories to settle so they can have less impact on their day-to-day experience.

What we know is that the mind has an incredible capacity to grow, change and heal. The ultimate therapeutic goal of treating PTSD is no longer to extinguish problematic symptoms and stop there. Instead, the goal is to go a step further to facilitate post-traumatic growth. Like a broken bone that heals back just a bit thicker and stronger, people who have PTSD, while they did not start out weaker by any means, have the potential to come out of the experience stronger, more centered, and with a resiliency that is unmatched.

Rather than spending energy on whether people are strong or weak, the focus should be on providing services in a way that is relevant to the individual while staying flexible enough to take into account personal beliefs and experiences.  

While Trump’s critics are focused on a few words taken out of context, our veterans with PTSD are doing marathon work to recover. When taken in context, it is clear that Trump respects and supports our military. I firmly believe that this experience has further informed his understanding of PTSD and that he will do all that is necessary to support veterans who are shouldering the emotional burden of the atrocities of war.

Dr. Kelly Morrow-Baez, aka The FitShrink, is a writer, speaker and Licensed Professional Counselor with Ph.D. in psychology.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.