Post Traumatic Stress disorder is considered a mental disorder that affects people who have experienced something painful or unbearable. These experiences can involve witnessing or causing death and destruction.
For example, if a man signs up for military service and is spirited away to strange lands to kill strange people—he becomes a likely candidate for PTSD. It is difficult for anyone to don battledress, blow up unfamiliar people in their homeland and maintain composure and sanity. Thus, it is no surprise that soldiers are one of the populations to acquire PTSD.
PTSD symptoms include intrusive thoughts, feelings, and sensations that are characterized by immeasurable and intense terror. These are alleged symptoms attributed to PTSD:
- Recurrent, involuntary, and intrusive memories.
- Traumatic nightmares.
- Dissociative reactions (e.g., flashbacks) which may occur on a continuum from brief episodes to complete loss of consciousness. Note: Children may reenact the event in play.
- Intense or prolonged distress after exposure to traumatic reminders.
- Marked physiologic reactivity after exposure to trauma-related stimuli.
Luckily, there is a "cure" for PTSD in soldiers—the main cure is prevention and empathy.
How Everyone Can Help Prevent PTSD
Everyone must stop persuading innocent young men to sign up for war. They must condemn the practice of military acculturation and stop worshiping slaughter lest more young people blithely undo their humanity. After seeing and enduring evil things, it is no wonder flashbacks, anxiety, fear, depression, and sickness paralyze the soldier.
So as long as people continually condone violence, their reward will be more broken heroes with broken spirits; it will be haunted and scarred warriors; warriors with shattered minds and hollow feelings. Their reward will come in the form of ghost towns filled with ghouls and guilt. Their payback will be the diminishing returns of shallow victories and maggot-torn corpses. The champions of war will wallow in this self-created hell until they sate their vicarious thirst for bloodshed, which can only happen when they discard their love for militaristic death cults.
PTSD, then, stops when war stops. Currently, people believe war is for self-defense. But it is not. War is the result of social engineering, political machinations, and chessboard games played by men with poisonous hearts. Instead of pushing for war and defending these psychopathic warmongers, people should empathize with the would be soldier. This will allow them to stop instigating the PTSD epidemic.
Discovering Empathy for People Thinking about Becoming a Soldier
True empathy requires understanding what soldiers might go through prior to enlisting (and after enlisting).
Discovering this empathy depends on the seeing humans as an end in themselves and not the means to an end. No one wants to see soldiers languish away as a result of their actions or their enemy's actions.
If people genuinely hate seeing soldiers suffer they should stop imagining that his service is necessary. This is the only way to completely love and connect with young men who want to soldier. If someone internalizes that they are celebrating the idea that young men should kill and die, they may wake up and know that they were making a mistake, and were not understanding the concept of their own selfish and sadistic desires. This is the most powerful form of empathy, and also a workable method for dissuading young men from joining the war squadrons.
It is how everyone can work together to become more humane. That is what everyone should vie for, and what a more peaceful and tranquil individual looks like.
Warfare is the firmament of emotional turmoil, and keeping our young men at home is tantamount to ending combat and combat-related PTSD. And everyone must embrace this change in order to finally stamp out the night terrors, recurring dreams, and murder memories.
It is the path to peace and love.
“Alone with thoughts of what should have long been forgotten, I let myself be carried away into the silent screams of delirium.” ― Amanda SteeleThe Cliff
My name is Sterlin. Follow me @ Psychologic-Anarchist. I also run the Psychologic-Anarchist Facebook page and produce many YouTube videos. My interests lie in the intersection of counseling psychology and anarchism. I write about the depredations of psychiatry, and also the new philosophy of compassionate anarchism. We have a large community devoted to discussing psychology and relational voluntaryism.
