2 weeks ago I attended a day long didactic at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley. The conference was put on by the Evangelical Luther Church of America. The goal of the day was to equip faith communities with resources that might help them minister to returning veterans from the OIF/OEF conflicts abroad. Though I had several beefs with the conference one comment has remained with me. A liaison officer of the U.S. Marine Corps proclaimed loudly, "I refuse to put the D on the end of PTS; it's my way of resisting the stigmatization of what our soldiers come home with."
Today I was riding over to the Menlo Park division of the VA where the National Center for PTSD is located. My colleagues and I were listening to NPR in the car and the radio program was exploring the Pentagon's recent statement that it would not reward the Purple Heart to soldiers with PTS. Several folks (mostly male, though one female journalist voice came through) called in to express opinions. Every person that called in or spoke from the studio talked about the normalcy of PTS in returning combat soldiers and vets. This is a good thing. But when it came to whether or not a soldier experiencing PTS should/could receive the Purple Heart, the line that seemed unquestionable for people had to do with the "physicality" of injury. Let me explain...
There was a recently returned OIF soldier who endured a physical injury while fighting in Falluja and he kept saying, PTS is not a physical injury; it's a mental illness. The Pentagon came from a similar conceptual framework when they likened PTS to a disease, not an enemy-inflicted war wound. Quite brilliantly, one caller said "Yeah but our military specializes in psychological warfare all the time, so how does psychological violence fall outside the jurisdiction of war-inflicted injury?" Indeed.
Further, I'd like to challenge the assumption that PTS falls outside the category of a "physical wound." Anyone who has suffered from PTS knows the condition involves devastating bodily affects. Secondly, trauma impacts several areas of the brain, particularly the amygdala, prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. The brain is a body part, neurotransmitters are somatic phenomena. It appears to me that drawing an arbitrary line between psychological and physical injury hinders our ability to think critically about the way war impacts physiological subjects. It reminds me a lot of the argument running through certain sects of Christianity about whether the flesh or spirit matter more in/to salvation. Well, I ask: where's the line between the two? Watch out for binaries; there's usually an agenda.
The way medical conditions get classified determines, not completely but to a large degree, how those conditions will be responded to culturally and how those conditions will be "helped" in the health care system. We can de-stigmatize PTS all day in magazine articles and talk shows (and unfortunately this is going to happen considering how popular the condition is among returning soldiers), but if the very persons who sent these womyn and men into war classify this condition as a disease or mental illness, the pejorative label still leaves the onus on the troops to advocate for themselves. Do you know what it would mean if the government actually classified PTS as something THEY helped create, instead of something that happens to "certain individuals"?? They'd have to accept responsibility and respond. That means money and an overhaul of social/mental health services. Hard to do when you've just run the economy into the ground, huh? G-d help us...
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