The worst national security administration ever has a hideous record of ministering to combat troops returning home with psychiatric issues. The military have been slow to recognize and treat post-traumatic stress disorder, and have returned soldiers to combat without treatment. The suicide rate for soldiers who are serving or have served in Afghanistan and Iraq is way up from previous years and even previous wars, not that we’ve declared any since World War II. Traumatic brain injuries have received almost as little shrift as psychiatric ones. In general, combat troops are treated like poorly maintained livestock.
Perhaps this accounts in part for the cannon fodder shortage that has led the Marine Corps to outsource policing chores at several facilities, with more to come. The Corps recently announced that their Beaufort, South Carolina, air base and the Parris Island troop depot will begin hiring civilian police officers to free up military police for combat duty. No word on how the freshly liberated MPs feel about the opportunity to collect their own Purple Heart-less psychic wounds.
Army troops and Marines aren’t the only ones suffering from PTSD or from authorities exploiting the condition. Students of ancient history will recall that the entire country went nuts, and stayed that way for quite some while, after 911. A new study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology suggests that the interminable post-911 yapping, not least from the Bush administration, kept the trauma fresh enough in the minds of many Americans, including the majority of our elected representatives, to allow the Bushies free reign in using the events as justification for everything from invading Iraq to warrantless electronic surveillance of US citizens to abrogating the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions against torture, kidnapping and kangaroo courts.
Which is to say that venting, or reliving a traumatic event over and over again, isn’t necessarily superior to the time-tested technique of simply repressing one’s reaction until it’s manageable. In fact, according to the study’s author, University of Buffalo shrink Mark Seery, letting it all out too soon and for too long may actually help to instigate PTSD.
The Bush administration probably were not aware of any academic research on the subject beyond the numerous historical demonstrations of the process, but they surely did recognize that the longer they could keep Americans scared shitless, the longer they could take advantage of the accompanying suspension of rational thought. Even today, enough people remain on autotrauma to keep the president’s job approval rating out of single-digit territory, although not enough to propel Rudy “911″ Giuliani to the GOP presidential nomination.
This is not to say that rending one’s garments and pulling out one’s hair at the roots in responding to a tragedy of magnitude is necessarily a bad thing; just that doing it over the course of four or five years may not be the healthiest option. We don’t want the administration to take the wrong message and decide that repression is healthy for the national soul.
