One Soldier's Tale of How War Drove Him Crazy

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted March 20, 2009.

He was having flashbacks, moments "where I just wasn't even here, you know? I was back there." He drank Wild Turkey all day, only sleeping when he passed out, until one night he didn't recognize his wife. He believes that he could have killed her that night.

The next day, he stopped drinking, and since then has used marijuana to self-medicate, but being stoned didn't make keeping a job any easier. He lost six in quick succession because he couldn't take orders from people who hadn't been where he had been.

That's when he "gave up on society," built his sandbox, and decided he was just going "be this crazy dude and stay in the house for the rest of my life." But being in the house didn't really solve the problem.

"I needed to get to the point where I wasn't afraid of my own thoughts," he told me.

Jim saw six or seven VA doctors after the incident with his wife. They all agreed that he had PTSD and a probable traumatic brain injury. On the basis of those diagnoses, he now gets a disability check from Social Security (but even after three years, the VA has yet to come through with benefits), but otherwise, none of them were much help.

Jim says that's because, "they just think they can tell you what to do and fix the problem. But they can't fix the person with PTSD. Only that person can, because it's a spiritual thing."

Dr. Ed Tick, psychotherapist, activist and author of the award-winning War and the Soul, would agree. He reminds us that the word psychotherapist means "soul attendant," and that psychology means "the order and meaning of the soul." "Psychology," he continues, "did not become a science until Freud and his followers arrived out of the medical tradition. Modern psychology left the soul far behind and has not yet reconnected with its spiritual roots, though it needs to, because psychological healing occurs at a spiritual level."

Jim now sees a Vet Center therapist, also an Afghanistan veteran, "who does a perfect job of making sure that I do help myself and standing behind me to make sure that I don't go backwards. Without him, I probably would still be in the house."

With the new GI Bill, he is going to college this fall. He plans to learn more about Buddhism and meditation so he can teach it as a kind of therapy for other soldiers.

"It's not like the PTSD is gone. Any medical professional would say that I'm the one with the disorder. But if you took me and some ‘normal' person, and you locked us in a completely dark room, he's the one that is going to go crazy because I've learned how to be alone in my head.

"I realized I had completely forgotten what Babah taught me -- that there is no such thing as a bad thought. It's just a thought. You can let it go. I remembered why I didn't feel angry or vengeful when Nasirjan was shot. I had completely forgotten for such a long time.

"I still prefer isolation over society, but I can go out now if I need to." He paused before adding, "I couldn't have done that last year."

After eight years of the Bush administration, any attempt to mix science with what might sound like religion is particularly suspect. At the same time, veterans like Jim are pointing the way into uncharted territory.

Jim calls PTSD a "soul wound that has its source in moral trauma." That diagnosis uses a language and a conceptual paradigm that is foreign to Western medicine, with its traditional disregard for matters of the soul or spirit.

But it may be that the only way to better understand the injuries our veterans bring home is to abandon that prejudice and try something new.

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Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day 2006. Her Web site is Flashback.

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