PDA

View Full Version : Older vets just now feeling pain of war



thedrifter
02-24-03, 08:31 AM
For elderly military veterans, retirement or bereavement may spark symptoms of war-related post-traumatic stress disorder.

By Scott Sleek
Monitor staff

A successful architect retires at age 61 and begins having combat nightmares from World War II. Another old veteran spirals into a delusional state, barricading himself in a dark closet because he thinks his wife is a German soldier. An emergency-room worker becomes traumatized by the site of a dead 9-year-old boy—a reminder of the Japanese lad he shot in the South Pacific 50 years ago.

For most of their adult lives, these men functioned as seemingly healthy, hard-working individuals, according to the numerous journal articles on such cases. But as they enter their golden years, these men begin showing symptoms of full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And psychologists aren’t sure why.

'Every clinician I know who has worked with older vets has talked about having a number of these cases—people who have never had problems with PTSD and then suddenly, in old age, have to come in for treatment,' says Paula Schnurr, PhD, who works at the executive division of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Vermont. 'But the data on this phenomenon are lacking.'

Schnurr is among a few psychologists who are exploring the effect of combat experience on aging. And they all contend that their research becomes increasingly important as Vietnam veterans approach old age. Vietnam veterans may have been the military population most closely associated with PTSD, and researchers predict that even more of them will develop symptoms as they retire and struggle with the normal physical decline and emotional challenges associated with aging. And they say that for all they know, the same may eventually happen to a large number of men and women who fought in Operation Desert Storm.

Anecdotal evidence

Despite that lack of empirical exploration into this delayed form of PTSD, clinical encounters abound. Terence Keane, PhD, director of the National Center for PTSD’s behavioral science division in Boston, first encountered the phenomenon in 1989 when a Navy veteran walked into his office a few days after a highly publicized explosion on the USS Iowa battleship. He told Keane that he had served on the same ship during World War II.

'He said a kamikaze pilot had hit the ship,' Keane says. 'He was injured in the explosion and was trapped with the body parts of his shipmates all around him. But he said he’d never thought about it again until he saw the stories on the news about the latest explosion.'

Mary Summers, PhD, a former VA psychologist in Augusta, Ga., recalls several older veterans who came into her office wondering why they were only recently having nightmares, sleeplessness and agonizing memories of their war experiences. A 72-year-old man, for example, had fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, but was never diagnosed with PTSD until after his wife died and he became plagued with memories of fellow soldiers’ deaths. Summers and her colleagues recount the man’s experience in a 1995 article for the journal Psychotherapy (Vol. 32, No. 2, p. 348–364).

Nadine Shigezawa, a VA psychologist in Honolulu, treats veterans who experienced some of the most traumatic events of World War II. Among her clients are survivors of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. She also treats many veterans of the Nisei 442nd Regiment, the Japanese-American soldiers who became the most decorated combat unit in American history, then returned home to find their families had lost homes and businesses during the government’s interment of Japanese-Americans. But many of them claim they never had troubling memories of their combat experiences until they grew older.

Unrecognized phenomenon

Despite these observations, only a fraction of the psychology profession has recognized and studied this delayed post-traumatic stress disorder among older war veterans, say clinicians and researchers. Studies on combat-related PTSD have focused mainly on Vietnam veterans, primarily because they seemed more urgently troubled, Schnurr says. Veterans of World War II, and to a lesser extent Korea, came home to a far more supportive and celebratory environment than the men who fought in Vietnam, she notes.

'The recovery environment was just much more favorable for World War II veterans,' she says. 'They could find it easier to look back and believe in what they were doing, in the grand scheme of things, than did those who fought in Vietnam.'

Some psychologists credit the potent work ethic of the 1940s and 1950s with warding off the troubling recollections. The veterans basically toiled themselves to such a state of exhaustion that they had no time or energy to preoccupy themselves with wartime recollections, psychologists theorize.

Although they could often point to their military service with far more pride than could Vietnam veterans, those who fought in the earlier wars returned to a domestic culture that expected them to get on with life and put the battle behind them, says Glen Elder, PhD, of the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

'There was a sense that once you were home from the war, you couldn’t talk about it,' says Elder, who has extensively studied the experiences of older war veterans.

When age forced their retirement, the traumatic memories seemed to resurface in distressing ways, the researchers add. Their minds seem to have had more time to recall traumatic events. Others may have felt older traumas resurface after they become widowers and find themselves spending more time alone.

'I do think there’s an increasing vulnerability to memories of traumatic experiences that is associated with age,' Elder says, 'because things in our lives become less controllable. We have to retire for health reasons, or our spouse dies.'

Hidden suffering?

Yet some PTSD researchers wonder whether the PTSD symptoms in older veterans were simply overlooked, rather than nonexistent, in the years following World War II and the Korean conflict.

'I think those veterans had symptoms earlier, but they just may not have been very obvious,' says Patricia Sutker, PhD, who is former chief of psychology at the VA Medical Center in New Orleans and has extensively studied prisoners of war. 'If you’d look back at their social interactions, you’d probably see that they’d been grumpy or isolated for quite some time.'

Few clinicians seem to refute the fact that many men are having more trouble coping with their war memories as they enter their retirement years, and they are actively looking for reasons.

Elder, for example, is interested in how veterans’ psychological functioning before their military service affects their adjustment throughout the rest of their lives. Sutker, in her study of POWs, has looked at how near-starvation during captivity can impair a person’s mental state later in life.

And Schnurr is investigating the effects retirement has on veterans. She’s using data from the VA’s Normative Aging Study, a longitudinal project involving more than 2,000 men, tracked since the 1960s. She’s looking at how men who were exposed to combat function before and after retirement to see if the retirement experience sparks the development of troubling combat memories.

In fact, Schnurr suspects that, for some veterans, retirement may better predict the onset of PTSD than the aging process itself. She remembers encountering a woman whose husband, a Vietnam Veteran who had recently retired from the New York City police force, was developing PTSD symptoms.

He was only 42.

Sempers,

Roger

United We Stand
God Bless America

Remember our POW/MIA's
I'll never forget!

firstsgtmike
02-24-03, 09:49 AM
Sorry.

I would give more credence to studies such as these if they also included stats from other countries.

For example; North and South Vietnam, Japan, North and South Korea, Germany, Central Europe, Russia, African tribes, Israel, etc. All of whom experienced war horrors equal to our own.

Is PTSD strictly an American phenominon?

greensideout
02-26-03, 08:57 PM
Originally posted by firstsgtmike
Sorry.

I would give more credence to studies such as these if they also included stats from other countries.

For example; North and South Vietnam, Japan, North and South Korea, Germany, Central Europe, Russia, African tribes, Israel, etc. All of whom experienced war horrors equal to our own.

Is PTSD strictly an American phenominon?


Some people have a harder go of it. Cut 'em some slack.

firstsgtmike
02-27-03, 01:42 AM
I had no intention of criticizing, downplaying, or questioning the validity of PTSD, or of those who suffer from it.

My question was based on an interest in universal sociology and psychology, to include cultural differences.

I read of an event, and various responses to it, and try to understand the reasons for the wide range of reactions.

If anyone was offended, I apologize, because that was NOT my intent.

However, I DO believe, that while not PC, my question on the universality of the syndrome was a valid one.

If the syndrome explains the reactions of a percentage of Americans to "memory joggers", perhaps it would help us to understand the reactions of people in other countries when the U.S. innocently creates a "memory jogger" and is mystified by the response.

greensideout
02-27-03, 05:58 PM
I believe that your original question is valid and has merit in questioning whether this is more cultural to America then other countries.

My responce was not intended to belittle what you said. You made a good point.

There is a good article (good for study), in The Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2003; "Behind Iraq Stance In Germany: Flood Of War Memories".
This article relates to the subject here and you may want to read it.

I think the condition exists for all humans and animals exposed to trauma. Dealing with it is, I feel the psychology side of it. It will vary so vastly from culture to culture AND how socities respond to it.

I'm not offended and I doubt anyone else was either by your post.

Semper Fi