PTSD ~ What's it all about?

[Sparrowhawk]

Many people wonder what is PTSD.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

I will post some of the most informative articles I have found on the internet and in my studies concerning PTSD here over the next few weeks. Other articles are welcomed.

But for now, I'll post some pictures that best describe what PTSD is from my point of view.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here is what PTSD was to me, before I knew what it was...

[Sparrowhawk]

PTSD once I found out what it was....

[Sparrowhawk]

[Sparrowhawk]

[Sparrowhawk]

[Sparrowhawk]

[Sparrowhawk]

[Sparrowhawk]

[Sparrowhawk]

[Sparrowhawk]

Veterans Administration

DIAGNOSTIC CRITERIA FOR 309.81 POSTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER

/A. The person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which both of the following were present:

1. The person experienced, witnessed, or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, a threat of the physical integrity of self or others.

2. The person's response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror.

/B. The traumatic event is persistently reexperienced in one (or more) of the
Following ways:

(1) Recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event, including
Images, thoughts, or perceptions.

(2) Recurrent distressing dreams of the event.

(3) Acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were reoccurring (includes a sense of reliving the experience, illusions, hallucinations, and sweating flashback episodes, including those that occur on awakening or when intoxicated or drugged

(4) Intense psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event

(5) Physiological reactivity on exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event

/C. Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness (not present before the trauma), as indicated by three (or more) of the following:

(1) Efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversations associated with the trauma

(2) Efforts to avoid activities, places, or people that arouse recollections with the trauma

(3) Inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma.

(4) Markedly diminished interest in participation in significant activities.

(5) Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others

(6) Restricted range of affect (e.g., unable to have loving feelings)

(7) Sense of a foreshortened future (e.g., does not expect to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span

/D. Persistent symptoms of increased arousal (not present before trauma), as indicated by two (or more) of the following:

(1) Difficulty falling or staying asleep.

(2) Irritability or outbursts of anger

(3) Difficulty concentrating

(4) Hyper vigilance

(5) Exaggerated startle response

/E, Duration of the disturbance (symptoms in Criteria B,C, and D) is more than one month

/F. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

(Specify)
ACUTE: if duration of symptoms is less than 3 months
CHRONIC if duration of symptoms is more than 3 months.


PTSD 101

[thedrifter]

By Gary Jacobson 2001


On the dark, soft shoulder of night
I come again calling
I bring a dram of violence in memorial spite,
Of renewed anger in hate spawning
Cataclysmic seed planted in long ago fight

A dollop of truth mixed with your favorite fears
Between here, and there
A malicious fear crashing across light years
Primal screams splitting the air.
Again I take you forlorn into that jungle sweating
Filled again with deep despair

Feel my coming
Destroying you mentally, spiritually, socially
Like a flood over you pouring
My memories sing
Again sensing with uncanny way of knowing
How I relish the physical pain I bring
In trials of body and spirit
You’re alone without reprieve or respite.

My warring spirit cuts the heads
Off the flowers of sprightful youth,
Impaling hearts of those but kids
Who go forth to fight in my battles uncouth!

How happy I am to see you once more abandoned
Maligned
Repressed
Feeling again bestial urges procreated
Hating everybody, yourself most of all
Again short of breath depressed
Moments before battle’s pall

Relive now the unthinkable degradation
Face the horror once more without deviation
Bury deep inside assaulting confusions.
Feel again rising anticipation of killing’s illusions.

Feel war's bloodied frenzy boiling in your brain
Feel the soulless fright of long ago despairing
Like restless spirits rising guilt’s refrain
In sensitivities killed dead and dying

Feel again the moment you have killed
Feel the blood on your hands you’ve spilled
Poking an eternal hole through your heart
Remember how you emptily joked of death
Hoping if you joked about deaths part
It would not come...but never fear
I am here!
I’m always near!
I will not forsake you as others have!
I will not let you so soon forget that year!

No, you have not escaped me American soldier
I harangue you still with scattered senses
In dreams bolder
That abed in rest you ponder
I penetrate your wearied defenses
Revive relentless spirits in you restless
Keeping you sleepless
Agitated
Anxious


continued.................................

[thedrifter]

By Gary Jacobson...2001

Awakening to sounds of a machine guns clatter
Its sickening thumping splattering human remains
See it...relive it, does this now still matter
Remember with venomous refrains
Whomp whomp whomp of helicopter chatter

My trauma comes into the dead of night grinding
Carried into the thickness of pain
My job to do the killing
Walking so softly in monsoon rain

My consuming anguish destroys you mentally
Walking
Suddenly embroiled in raucous cacophony
Creeping
So as not to wake the dead
Assuage culminating
Of war's foul dread.

Dream your sweet dreams
Try to forget Nam’s incessant toxicology
Consorting with the demon of schemes
Mitigate war’s vicious abnormality

Pressing to futile irritability
I scream till you can’t think clearly
Everybody around making life uncomfortable
But don't worry, I’ll always be there
Ever reminding you of that vacant chair
You really should have sat there...

Every night I'll show you the empty eyes
Discover again your gut shot brother
I'll make you look deep into the eyes
Of his fatherless child
Look into tearful eyes
Of his young bride...
O no, you cannot hide...

Think back on war’s vicious anomaly
Where more than ever before in life history
Those loved dearest
Bide away from you farthest,
While specters of death hover ever more nearest.

Feel now that familiar tingling up your spine.
Feel taut knots impatiently forming in your gut.
In your bed in prone ambush lying supine
In cutthroat night relive freedom’s juggernaut.

Feel coiled springs inside me
Still begging for release
Violence boiling in me
Stored there to remember evermore without peace
Come rushing adrenaline
Across light years that will not their terror's cease
Living from then to now maudlin.

Still you're every night fighting
Across Satan’s fetid turf churning
Into voracious jaws of death's maw mouthing
Still every night waking
Remembering still the killing

Still in dreams see the dead
Blood running into eyes thick and red
Life shattered by horns that still gore
Still cursing barbaric war’s carnivore
Still both God and devil imploring
Still Hell on earth enduring.

What great loyalty you have for me.
I don’t have to kill you dead
To have you join me
Because by all appearances you’re already dead
You're killing yourself daily
Living with atrocity that war in you bred
I'm more important to you obviously,
Than friends with all their loving
I’ve taken over your life bullishly,
I’m the first thing you wake up to every morning.
Robbed of will to do anything about it, candidly.

I journey with you through wretched life abysmally
Riding choppers to the end of your thousand yard stare
Back to where life treated you so abusively
Ever going in memory back there
In life lived painfully
Still looking for answers back there

You find pleasure in the mire wallowing
Ever looking for meaning
In gutters metaphorically
Day to day living In past memory abhorrently.

You cannot escape
Coping with this pall over you I drape...
I’m with you day and night
Ever part of your mind's landscape
Renewing war's ingrained bite...

We drink together my brother, till you pass out
Feeling sorry for yourself inherently,
Just a burned out boyscout
By the very ones you served outcast abjectly

Long ago in a land called Vietnam
I first got ahold of you to make life accurst
Bore into your inner being my ticking time bomb
Perpetuating the dream of innocence burst
Permeating your soul from that time on....
Destroying on, and on, and on...

You can never have enough guilt,
Shaking with icy cold sweat
I've a monster in you built
You can never pay my debt
Jailed, insane, lost in another institution
Trying for what you've done to make restitution

Of my insidious hold you’ll never be free...
Bound to go through life pathetically.
Unproductive, barren, unbearably
Sacrificing jobs, friends, loved ones...to me!
Forever mine for all time you see
You belong to me unalterably
I'm your very own PTSD!
Won’t you come again and talk to me?

Sempers,

Roger

[thedrifter]

By Gary Jacobson....2001

Soul so weary
Tossed, lost, and oh so dreary
Dead-eyed bleary
Coming back from the fighting
Almost dying
In Vietnam war tumultuous
Lost along the way my innocence
All in my life held virtuous
Misplaced sacred values in the tempest forlorn
Gone the faith I based my life on
Disoriented, the best of me cut'n shorn
Spirit misused
Abused
By the sleight of "the man"
The cunning craftiness of his hatred plan
Fighting for survival in a beleaguered land
Sacrificed
Mislaid
What a high price for your freedom we paid
Still looking for redemption
Trying to make the hate to loving transition
Trying to mask the killer in Nam I'd become
In my year of the gun
Under the blistering, hot, Vietnamese sun...

I knocked at your door
I think I know you from before
Please let me in I implore
Just come from riding a hateful beast called war
Give my impoverished soul relief
Give me succor to restore my belief
Lift up my faith in my fellow man
Help me again to understand
Comfort my soul
Lift me out of this contentious hole
Show the way again to trust
Lead me
Guide me
Walk beside me
I will try your sensibilities not to disgust
For I am a child again you see
Needing refreshing food and drink
For to rebuild the tarnished soul
My humanities death on the brink
Misplaced my life’s goal...
Are you there,
Are you there,
I cry in the silence
Save me I pray from this castigated violence...

But I saw and heard nothing from you...
But Closed doors!

Sempers,

Roger

[Sparrowhawk]

CLICK on LINK FOR MUSIC THEN ON Picture

http://www.angelfire.com/space/sparrowhawk/dutycall.ram

[Sparrowhawk]

Bones, Drifters and NamNuts reply, in the Morning coffee tread, Linda's work on Ron's photos .. it all brought back memories ... all rolled into one...

Originally posted by NamNuts
I've been up since 0400 went out took my Java over to my favorite place for thinking!

I, had a bad night with memories of more current events, in the last day or so!

When i get that way OR even when i just want some peace and quiet i head for the "Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park" in downtown GB[/i]

I went out to see Ron Moore's gravesite not too long ago, I felt an urgency to spend sometime there. As I traveled on the freeway, I saw his face, clear as day, with his smile full of warmness like I remembered. I knew there and there everything was going to be alright.

Spend the time there at his graveside, laid next to him and talked, like we had on Hill 65, just a few days before he was killed.

Ron Moore's page in History


Little things in life can bring us great pleasure, sorrow, pain, memories and a reason to live.

We own them all a reason to live, because they paid the price to give us that chance. Perhaps that's why so many Vietnam Veterans enjoy life, protect it and why it bothers us so, to see so much injustice in the world.

We do what we can, then sit back and hope others do their part.

Sempers Marines

Cook