1、Sebastian Junger Our L ...
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En, I worked as a war reporter for 15 years before I realizes that I really had a problem. There was something really wrong with me. This was about a year before 9`11 and America wasn’t at war yet. We weren’t talking about PTSD, we were not yet talking about the effects of trauma at war on the human psyche. I’ve been in Afghanistan for a couple of months with the northern alliance as they were fighting the Taliban. At that point, the Taliban had an air force, they had tanks, they had artillery. And we really get hammered , pretty badly a couple of time. We saw some ugly things, but I didn’t it really affected me. I didn’t think much about it. I came home New York, where I lived. Then one day, I went down in the subway. It was the first time in my life I knew real fear, I had a massive panic attack. I was way more scared than I’ve ever been in Afghanistan. Everything I was looking at seemed like it was gonna kill me, but I couldn’t understand, I couldn’t explained why. The trains were going too fast, there were too many people, the lights were too bright, everything was too loud, everything was moving too quickly. And I, I back up against the support column and I just waited for it. I couldn’t take it any longer, I ran out the subways station and walked where I was going. Later, I found out that what I had was short-term PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We involves animals as primates to survive periods of danger. If your life’s in danger, you wanna react unfamiliar noises, you wanna sleep slightly, wake up easily, you wanna have nightmares and flashbacks of the thing that could kill you. You want to be angry ’cause it makes you predisposed to fight or depressed because it keeps you out of circulation a little bit, keeps you safe. It’s not very pleasant but it’s better than getting eaten. Most people recover from that pretty quickly. it takes a few weeks, few months. I kept having panic attacks, but eventually they went away . I, I have no idea what’s connected to the war that I’ve seen. I just thought I was going crazy, and then I thought, well, I am not going crazy any more. About 20% of people, however, wind up with chronic long-term PTSD, they are not adapted to temporary danger. They are maladapted for every day life, unless they get help. We know that people who are vulnerable to long-term PTSD, or people who are abused as children, who suffer trauma as children, people who have low education levels, people who have psychiatric disorders in their family, if you served in Vietnam, and your brother is schizophrenic, you are way more likely to get long-term PTSD from Vietnam. So I started to study this as a journalist, and I realized that there were something really strange going on. The number seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Every war that we have fought as a country, starting with the civil war, the intensity of the combat has gone down. As a result, the casualty rate has gone down, but disability rate has gone up. They should be going in the same direction, but they’re going in different direction. The recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced, thank God, a casualty rate about, about one third of what it was in Vietnam. But, they have also created, they have also produced three times the disability rate. Around 10% of the U.S. military is actively engaged in combat, 10% or under, they’re shooting at people, they are killing people, they are getting shot at, they’re seeing their friends get killed. This is incredibly traumatic. It’s only about 10% of our military, but about half of our military have filed for some kind of PTSD compensations from the government. And suicide doesn’t even fit into this in a, in a very logical way. I, er, we have all heard that tragic statistics of 22 vets a day on average in this country killing themselves. Most people don’t realize that the majority of those suicides were veterans of the Vietnam war that generation, and their decisions to take their own lives actually might not be related to the war that they fought 50 years earlier. In fact, there’s no statistical connection between combat and suicide. If you are the military and you are in a lot, in a lot of combats, you are no more likely to kill yourself than if you weren’t. In fact, one study found that if you deploy Iraq or Afghanistan, you are actually slightly less likely to commit suicide later.
I study anthropology in college. I did my field work at Navajo reservation. I wrote a thesis on Navajo long distance runners. And while, recently while I was, while I was researching PTSD, I had this, I had this thought. I, I thought back to, to the work I did when I was young, and I thought I bet the Navajo, the Apache, the Comanche. And it’s a very warlike nations. I bet they were getting PTSD like we do. When their warriors came back fighting the U.S. military or fighting each other. I bet they pretty much slipped right back into tribal life. And maybe what determines the rate of long-term PTSD isn’t what happened out there but the kind of society you come back to. And maybe if you come back to a close, cohesive, tribal society, you will get over trauma pretty quickly. and if you come back to an alienating modern society, you might remain traumatized your entire life. Another words, maybe the problem isn’t them to bet, maybe the problem is us.
Certainly, modern society is harder on the human psyche, by every metric that we have. As wealth goes up in the society, the suicide rate goes up instead of down. If you live in modern society, you are up to 8 times likely to suffer from depression you lifetime than if you live in a poor agrarian society.
Modern society has probably produced the highest rates of suicide and depression and anxiety and loneliness and child abuse ever in human history. I saw one study that compared women in Nigeria, one of the most chaotic and violent and corrupted and one of the poorest country in Africa to women in north America, and the highest rate of depression were urban women in north America. That was also the wealthiest group.
So let’s go back, let’s go back to the U.S. military, 10% are in combat, around 50% have filed for PTSD compensation. So about 40% of veterans really were not traumatized overseas but have come home to discover that they are dangerously alienated and depressed. So what is, what is happening with them What is going on with those people, the phantom 40% that are troubled but they don’t understand why maybe it’s this. Maybe they had an experience of sorts of tribal closeness in their unit when they’re overseas. They were eating together, sleeping together, doing tasks and missions together. They were trusting each other with their lives. And then they come home, and they have to give all that up. And they are coming back to a society, a modern society which is hard on people who weren’t even in the military. It’s just hard on everybody.
And we keep focusing on trauma, PTSD. But for a lot of these people, maybe it’s not trauma, I mean, certainly, soldiers are traumatized and, and the ones who all have to be treated for that. But a lot of them, maybe what’s bothering them is actually a kind of alienation. I mean, maybe we just have the wrong word for some of it. And just changing our language, our understanding will help a little bit--Post-Deployment Alienation Disorder.
Maybe just even calling it that for some of these people would allow them to stop imagining trying to imagine a trauma that didn’t really happen in order to explain a feeling that is really happening. And in fact, it’s an extremely dangerous feeling. That alienation and depression can lead to suicide. These people are in danger. It’s very important to understand why.
The Israeli military has a PTSD rate of around 1%. The theory is that everyone in Israel is supposed to serve in military. When soldiers come back from the front line, they are not going from a military, environment to a civilian environment, they are coming back to a community everyone understands. About the military, everyone’s been in it, or is going to be in it. Everyone understands the situation they’re all in. it is as if they are all in a big tribe.
We know that if you take a lab rat, and traumatize it and put it in a cage by itself, you can maintain its trauma symptoms almost indefinitely. And if you take that same lab rat, and put it in a cage with other rats, after a couple of weeks, it’s pretty much ok.
After 9`11, the murder rate in New York City went down by 40%, the suicide rate went down. The violent crime rate in New York went down after 9`11. Even combat veterans of previous wars, who suffered from PTSD, said that their symptoms went down after 9`11 happened. The reason is that if you traumatize an entire society, we don’t fall apart and turn on one another. We come together, we unify. Basically, we tribalize. And that process of unify feels so good and it’s so good for us that it even helps people who are struggling with mental health issues. During the blitz in London, admissions to psychiatric wards went down during the bombings.
For a while, that was the kind of country that American soldiers came back to—a unified country. We are sticking together. We are trying to understand the threat against us. We are trying to help us, trying to help our, ourselves and the world. But that’s changed. Now, American soldiers, American veterans are coming back to a country that’s so bitterly divided that the two political party are literally accusing each other of treason, of being enemy of the state, of trying to undermine the security and the welfare of their own country. The gap between rich and poor is the biggest than it’s ever been. It’s just getting worse. Racial relations are terrible. There are demonstrations and even riots in street because of racial injustice. And veterans know that any tribe that treats itself that way, in fact, any platoon that treats itself that way, would never survive. We’ve got used to it. Veterans have gone away and are coming back and seeing their own country with fresh eyes. And they see what’s going on. This is the country they fought for, no wonder they’re depressed, no wonder they are scared.
Sometimes, we ask ourselves if we can save the vets, I think the real question is if we can save ourselves. If we can, I think the vets is gonna be fine.
It’s time for this country to unite, if only to help the men and women who fought to protect us.
Thank you very much!
( Applause! )
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第1章 Sebastian Junger
