We All Can Have PTSD

PTSD (acronym for post-traumatic stress disorder) has started expanding its applicability way beyond its military context, it seems to me.  Historically, the concept of PTSD developed from the stress of combat and other horrors of war causing either damage to brain physiology or to the individual psychology of the mind, or both.  Its symptoms, regardless of particular causes in particular cases, are a myriad of brain disorders that cause mild to chronic disruptions of normal brain function.  In World War I, it was called “shell shock,” and in World War II on in to Vietnam, it was called “combat fatigue.”  I want to make the case that all of us can have shell shock and combat fatigue without experiencing a second of combat, without a speck of horror or brain damage.

My most vivid experience of PTSD in a Vietnam vet was when I was working with faculty members from Waxahachie High School years ago in preparation for a faculty party to be held at the Waxahachie National Guard Armory several years ago.  Helping us build stage sets for party performances was David Simmons, building trades instructor at the high school and a Vietnam vet.  The Waxahachie Guard was moving the last cargo truck out of the building when David, upon hearing the truck’s engine, immediately had a flashback to Vietnam.  He dropped his hammer and had to be helped to sit down on the edge of the stage we were building.  For a few moments, he could not stop the imagery in his head; only when the truck had exited the building did he return to “normal.”  Clearly this was purely mental PTSD, as I am not aware of his suffering a head injury during the war.

Equally clear are PTSD-like cases of closed head injuries, such as result from motorcycle accidents.  I remember my friend Rick Qualls and I visiting a motorcycle accident victim who was seeing blood on the fossils he was collecting; we were “experts” invited by his mother to examine the fossils and help him be a little more critical in his hopefully therapeutic hobby.  We to no avail could convince him his iron-compound stains were not blood or that blood does not normally leave trace fossils.  At least he was not a “vegetable,” but that was little consolation to a mother whose son’s close head injury had interjected tragedy so cruelly into the family.  The son was experiencing something personally real in his head, just as David was in his head inside the armory, but the something was permanent, not temporary, as in David’s case.

I have come to think similarly about my older son Dan, who experienced a closed head injury in 1986 as a freshman in high school with a collision on bicycle with a van.  He is Sylvia’s and my “miracle child,” as he clearly recovered completely from all his physical injuries and almost recovered completely from his brain injuries.  Years after his accident, only the stress of traumatic events like divorce revealed his inability to deal with higher cognitive functions, as now in the past few years he is incapable of finding and holding a job.  Only recently have I recognized his cognitive trauma as PTSD-like, showing symptoms like paranoia, depression, mistrust, and hallucinatory reports.  But his brain recovery was so complete he now has a healthy case of denial, stubbornly refusing to recognize he is behaving abnormally.  But, when seen in comparison to the motorcycle accident victim, our son could have suffered mentally much worse.

Also helping me to recognize my son’s form of PTSD (in my opinion), was my recent development of Perception Theory (Perception is Everything, [Jan., 2016]) and its wide spectrum of applications in our universal experiences (Perception Theory (Perception is Everything) — Three Applications, [Feb., 2016], Perception Theory: Adventures in Ontology — Rock, Dog, Freedom, & God, [March, 2016], and I Believe!, [October, 2016]).  Perception Theory was suggested to me during explaining the role hallucinations played in the origin and development of Christianity (At Last, a Probable Jesus, [August, 2015]), in which I shared my own flashback-like hallucinations.  Emerging from both projects conjured the realization my own non-combat hallucinations (only requiring some kind of trauma of the mind — not necessarily bad or harmful trauma) might mean I too have a form of PTSD, and, by extrapolation, all of us have the capability to empathize with PTSD victims, for we have experienced it ourselves, but have not recognized it as such.

 

I know I can empathize with David, with the motorcycle accident victim, and with my son Dan, for I have had several PTSD flashbacks over the years.  Rather than repeating those in At Last, a Probable Jesus, [August, 2015], I thought I would share with you three others:

1)  I grew up, as I’ve said in my memoirs and in my book SXYTMCHSC1964M4M (ISBN 978-0-692-21783-2, College Street Press, Waxahachie, TX, 2014) {See Fun Read, [August, 2014] to read how to attain a copy}, I grew up simultaneously at three homes, one with my parents in town in Cisco, Texas, and in the two rural homes of both sets of my grandparents outside Cisco.  The “home” of my maternal grandparents, the McKinneys, was completely destroyed by a tornado in May, 2015, a site that belongs to my wife and me nowadays.  For sentimental reasons I had the bulldozer and track hoe “cleaning up” the site leave a surviving iron yard gate still swinging on its hinges, so that any time I want, I can go out there, open the gate, and slam it shut.  That sound it makes when closing conjures images of the house and yard and of me going in and out the gate as a young boy.  I cannot help but see the house and yard, even though they are not there today.  The images are triggered by the slamming of the gate; it’s like being one of Pavlov’s dogs.  There is some possible bad trauma in this example, because of memory of the tornado, but the images are pleasant and very sentimental.  This feels to me as a PTSD-like experience of bittersweet memories and pleasant imagery, triggered by an iron-on-iron collision.  The imagery doesn’t last but a few moments, but can be re-conjured by slamming the gate again.  (This gate triggering also seems to work, at least mildly, on first cousins of mine who spent a lot of time at the site also as young children.)

2)  In the summer of 2007 I arranged a very personal and emotional moment upon myself when I confided in my good friend Bill Adling (See SXYTMCHSC1964M4M.) that I was about to write my life’s novel at the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.  He was the first in whom I confided such information, and I had insisted I tell him in private away from our wives.  The site chosen to reveal my secret to Adling was a neon display advertising the Beatles-based performances of “Love” by Cirque du Soleil at the Mirage.  The display had places at which we could sit.  It is hard to overstate how important the Beatles are and were to Adling’s and my friendship — for example, the two of us, along with our fellow fast friend/high school prankster Bob Berry, claim to be the very first Beatles fans in Cisco as 1963 changed to 1964.  How appropriate a setting for me to share my secret with Adling!  Fast forward to the summer of 2016, when just my wife and I were “taking in” Las Vegas and I was wandering around the casino floor of the Mirage while my wife Sylvia was still playing video poker.  I wandered to the spot where the neon display was 9 years earlier (It was now gone, despite the fact “Love” was still playing — we saw the show again, incidentally.), but I recognized the spot by its surroundings.  And suddenly, here came into my head bright neon lights, Adling’s face, and exchanged words I seemed to remember from almost a decade ago!  It was very fleeting but no less vivid.  The “trauma” must have been the “stress” of keeping the secret from everyone except Adling at the time, but the feeling was exhilarating, making me momentarily almost giddy!  I now look upon this moment as a PTSD-like experience.

3)  The third of this trio is the most PTSD-like to me and, coincidentally, the most gross.  Near the McKinney house of 1) above, my Granddad McKinney, among other animals, raised and kept for selling and butchering (Yes, the tornado left the rock and concrete foundation of the old slaughter house.) hogs, lots of hogs.  Playing in and around the lots, sheds, and barns there as a boy, I was in a constant menagerie of not only hogs, but cattle, chickens, turkeys, and peafowl.  Fast forward to just a few years ago, I had stopped at Brendan Odom’s house (Brendan today leases much of the land my wife and I own, including the McKinney place.), which coincidentally is on the road between where my Granddad McKinney lived and my Granddad Hastings lived, to ask him something.  Away from his house but sort of in the extended front yard was a covered cattle trailer, one of my dad’s old ones, in which Brendan kept wild hogs he had trapped for sale to buyers with customers craving “wild pork.” (Today, because of the collapse of the small-scale hog market, no one today raises hogs such as my grandfather did.)  As I walked by the trailer, I noted there were no hogs in it, but that there recently been some “residents,” as my nose was bombarded by the unmistakable odor of hog shit!  And the imagery flowed in my head of hogs wallowing, hogs sleeping, hogs feeding, and hogs squealing.  I could not stop seeing them!  As David’s trigger was auditory, mine in this moment was olfactory.  I had to walk away almost to the house to get the imagery to stop.  The trauma, as well as the trigger, was the incredibly bad odor, so the images were not particularly pleasant.

 

Perception Theory (Perception is Everything, [Jan., 2016], (Perception Theory (Perception is Everything) — Three Applications, [Feb., 2016], Perception Theory: Adventures in Ontology — Rock, Dog, Freedom, & God, [March, 2016], and I Believe!, [October, 2016]) suggests what is going on in our heads during PTSD experiences.  Some non-veridical trauma in our mind triggers uncontrollable perceptions upon our inner world view, momentarily or permanently blocking or suspending the non-veridical brain mechanisms by which we normally determine that what we are perceiving at the moment “must have been a dream.”  The uncontrollable perceptions seem as real and the controlled perceptions we receive from the “outside world” outside our brains.  They are suspensions of rationality, much like what we do when we fall in love.  Often they make us doubt our sanity, and often we are reluctant to share them with others for fear they will doubt our sanity.  Yet, history has shown they can cover the spectrum of individual perception from the destruction of life, through little or no effect, to the basis of starting a religion or a political movement.

PTSD-like experiences are profound epiphenomenal capabilities of our brain, part of the evolutionary “baggage” that was part of our “big brain” development.  I would guess it was a trait neutral to our survival (or, “tagging along” with our vital survival trait of the ability to irrationally fall in love), and, therefore, could be a vestigial trait passed into our future by the same genes that produce our vital non-veridical existence within our brains (in our minds).  Whatever future research into them brings, I will always be fascinated by their possible triggers within an individual, whether it be combat, closed-head injuries, a sound from the past, the Fab Four, or hog shit.

RJH