Told in the voice of a Soldier-turned-therapist who struggled through her own debilitating PTSD, The Soldier's Guide is a call to arms, offering facts, empathy, and direction, while urging Service Members to get the help they need, helping family members to understand the battlefield, and connecting civilians with a Warrior culture.
Compelling stories of American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with what are now considered this war's signature injuries-- TBI and PTSD -- along with the experiences of our mental health professionals newly mobilized to assist them.
Too often American veterans return from combat and spiral into depression, anger and loneliness they can neither share nor tackle on their own. Military Mental Health Care: A Guide for Service Members, Veterans, Families, and Community seeks to aid our troubled, returning forces by dissecting the numerous mental health problems they face upon arriving stateside. Don Philpott and Cheryl Lawhorne-Scott, co-authors with Janelle Hill of the highly successful Wounded Warrior Handbook, detail not only each issue’s symptoms, but also discuss what treatments are available, and the best ways for veterans to access those treatments while readjusting to civilian life. In addition, they connect and explain many alarming trends, such as joblessness, poverty and addiction, appearing in our nation’s veteran population on a broader scale. PTSD and struggles with anxiety affect far more than veterans themselves, as sobering phenomena like homelessness, suicide, domestic violence and divorce too often become realities for those returning from war. Military Mental Health Care is both a resource for struggling veterans and a useful tool for their loved ones, or anyone looking for ways to support the veterans in their lives.
War and PTSD are on the public's mind as news stories regularly describe insurgency attacks in Iraq and paint grim portraits of the lives of returning soldiers afflicted with PTSD. These vets have recurrent nightmares and problems with intimacy, can’t sustain jobs or relationships, and won’t leave home, imagining “the enemy” is everywhere. Dr. Edward Tick has spent decades developing healing techniques so effective that clinicians, clergy, spiritual leaders, and veterans’ organizations all over the country are studying them. This book, presented here in an audio version, shows that healing depends on our understanding of PTSD not as a mere stress disorder, but as a disorder of identity itself. In the terror of war, the very soul can flee, sometimes for life. Tick's methods draw on compelling case studies and ancient warrior traditions worldwide to restore the soul so that the veteran can truly come home to community, family, and self.
From the Director and Associate Director of the VA's National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: a highly practical, user-friendly guide that answering all conceivable questions about returning from war--for veterans and families Two experts from the VA National Center for PTSD provide an essential resource for service members, their spouses, families, and communities, sharing what troops really experience during deployment and back home. Pinpointing the most common after-effects of war and offering strategies for troop reintegration to daily life, Drs. Friedman and Slone cover the myths and realities of homecoming; reconnecting with spouse and family; anger and adrenaline; guilt and moral dilemmas; and PTSD and other mental-health concerns. With a wealth of community and government resources, tips, and suggestions, After the War Zone is a practical guide to helping troops and their families prevent war zone stresses from having a lasting negative impact.
In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.
Much has rightly been written about the physiological and psychological symptoms, known as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suffered by combat veterans, and their treatment. Much less has been written about the moral, spiritual and existential pain that soldiers experience as a consequence of carrying through the stated purpose of war for the common soldier - kill the enemy until the war is won. Based on his 20+ years' experience of treating combat veterans, Dr Larry Dewey explores the war trauma and life adaptation of combatants over two decades of intensive treatment. He addresses moral, spiritual and existential issues while also attending to the important physiological and psychological symptoms. Using case material, thoughts, experiences and, literally, the words of 65 veterans of various wars, he portrays in depth and with meaningful detail the process of successful treatment and the eventual positive adaptation for these veterans. The volume explores the deep pain and burden of killing and the role of propaganda and love in starting and maintaining war. Through the veterans' stories the author portrays the personal war of the ordinary combatant and the burden of guilt, grief and pain they often carry afterwards. The second part tackles the actual healing process, and part three explores the concepts of sin, confession, mercy, forgiveness, redemption and love, and how veterans have used them in aiding their own recovery from war's grief and moral pain. War and Redemption provides an invaluable tool in the understanding and treatment of PTSD for therapists, veterans and their families. It will also be a fascinating and valuable resource for all those interested in PTSD more generally.
Healing War Trauma details a broad range of exciting approaches for healing from the trauma of war. The techniques described in each chapter are designed to complement and supplement cognitive-behavioral treatment protocols—and, ultimately, to help clinicians transcend the limits of those protocols. For those veterans who do not respond productively to—or who have simply little interest in—office-based, regimented, and symptom-focused treatments, the innovative approaches laid out in Healing War Trauma will inspire and inform both clinicians and veterans as they chart new paths to healing.
Finally, a book that plainly explains Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Moral Injury, and how Service Members can reclaim their lives step-by-step As a therapist, Virginia Cruse was becoming frustrated with the rumors her clients heard about PTSD that kept them from getting better. Why did so many of them believe that PTSD had no cure? That they couldn't have PTSD because they were not in direct combat? That they didn't "deserve" to have PTSD, or didn't "deserve" to get better? The answer hit a nerve with Cruse: no one had taken the time to explain PTSD to Service Members in a way that made sense. Soldiers were losing their resiliency and optimism in a culture that propagated misinformation and went against the facts about PTSD, facts that are necessary to know in order to recover good mental health and salvage important relationships. Told in the voice of a Soldier-turned-therapist who struggled through her own debilitating PTSD, The Soldier's Guide does not waste time cutting through the bull and getting down to brass tacks. It is a call to arms, offering facts, empathy, and direction, while urging Service Members to get the help they need, helping family members to understand the battlefield, and connecting civilians with a Warrior culture.
