The Effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder on Soldiers - Essay Example

Some of the triggers can be natural disasters, severe accidents, military combat, or violent assaults between people. PTSD in military veterans is important to understand because it is often the cause of service members committing suicide or killing themselves and their families. According to the new study, researchers had previously found that there is a connection between a hormone-like molecule called PACAP and the brain's ability to respond to stress. The researchers checked the PACAP levels and found that they were higher in people with PTSD. The challenge for this research was that this connection was related only to women. These researchers also looked at how PACAP impacted fear in women. They found that a genetic encoding called PAC1 was more present in women who had PTSD and high levels of PACAP, also had this gene which is a gene that responds to estrogen. The researchers believe that this is a first step in helping find a way to predict who will get PTSD (Moisse, 2011).

According to Howard and Crandall (2007), the systems that are most used in PTSD are the autonomic system and the sympathetic systems. The autonomic system regulates the basic body systems without us thinking about it. The sympathetic system controls the handles our reaction to the "fight or flight" condition while the parasympathetic system works on physical symptoms like slowing the heart down, stimulating digestion and constricting the pupils of the eyes. The hippocampus of the brain remains in a state of "high alert" so that it can bring the body into a familiar state of what happened in similar threats from the past. In so doing, it will also overproduce the hormone, cortisol along with other "neuro-excitatory transmitters" and hippocampal cells will "degenerate and eventually die" (Trappler, 2010, p. 1). The brain and the other symptoms react very quickly as the individual is having a PTSD experience.

The Video Reaction to Stress
In the video, The Soldier's Heart many soldiers spoke about how they reacted to stress. It was clear that not only were their physical reactions to stress but also psychological ones. Many soldiers spoke about the physical symptoms of seeing things or hearing things that were not in their present life. They also spoke about becoming angry, depressed and attempting to ignore what they were feeling. Once soldier talked about crying uncontrollably and spending time just staring into space. The psychological aspects of PTSD were more devastating for the soldiers in the video because they were not allowed to talk about them.

They stated that the military expects them to be able to handle what happened to them without assistance from counseling. The challenge is that many soldiers saw people die in front of them or had to kill people they did not know. These soldiers who were in Iraq stated that they found themselves drinking more frequently and drinking more alcohol than was normal for them, not wanting to be around people and talking more about Iraq to anyone who would listen. These psychological issues often created more challenges for them as they went through their lives. One soldier committed suicide by hanging himself with a garden hose because of his feelings about killing an innocent Iraqi woman.

The challenge for the military is that up until recently, they were not doing anything to treat soldiers with PTSD because they believed that the soldier was showing cowardice. Now, they are attempting to make sure that all soldiers coming back from the wars go through psychological testing and examination when they come back home so they can find better ways of treating this disorder. The soldiers in the video also said that their PTSD lasted for many years because they were afraid to seek help because of the military's attitude towards asking for help. It does not seem to be a positive situation for military personnel to seek help for PTSD. In order for this to be an effective intervention, the attitude of military upper management would need to change in order to make seeking help a positive situation.

Helping People Cope with PTSD
The National Institute of Mental Health (2009) states that treatment for PTSD is usually psychotherapy, using "talk" therapy with medication. They stress that the psychotherapist should have knowledge and skill at working with PTSD. A model of psychotherapy that has worked is Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) because it provides exposure therapy (where the individual faces their fear by experiencing the trauma in a safe way), cognitive restructuring (where the individual learns how to make sense of the memories they are having) and stress inoculation training that teaches the individual how to relax. Medication is used to assist in the biological issues of PTSD. Antidepressants are used to help veterans deal with depression and have been shown to help some veterans and are highly effective for others (Hamblen, n.d.). Read More