It’s been a month since the troops left their bases in Iraq to head home. They came back with a lot of baggage. They came back with stories. They came back with souvenirs. They came back with tattoos of brotherhood. They came back for good after eight years of battle in Iraq. And one in five of them came back to fight with their own minds.

There have been more than a million veterans of the war in Iraq, which means that more than 200,000 of them have been estimated to be struggling with an internal conflict that can hardly be dealt with alone. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is dehumanizing. It takes the color from the world; it turns it gray. It makes a dream into a nightmare. It makes a transition a struggle, and a struggle that many veterans are seeking aid for, to the point that many veteran’s hospitals across the country are being bogged down with patients.

“We have been doing it thus far,” Shawn O’connor, a pyschologist with the John Cochran Veteran’s Center, said. “Our staff is well trained to deal with the various types of PTSD. Luckily, we have different types of treatment in various areas, otherwise we would be in trouble.”

Help comes in many different forms. Sometimes through the VA; sometimes it comes in other ways. Jerry Marks is a private practice social worker who served in Vietnam for 13 years as a major. He was a captain in active duty and chief of the mental health clinic on base who has seen his fair share of soldiers with PTSD, even from that era.

“I’ve seen really about eight pretty severely traumatized soldiers,” Marks said. “For a lot of these guys, they’re not going to come in and start talking about something until it gets to be a problem in their family.”

The problems within families can grow quickly. Families are exposed to the pitfalls of PTSD more than anyone. Still, experts say that the family dynamic is incredibly beneficial to the transition of a soldier, even though it can be emotionally taxing on every member.

The stress on the family is only one of the many outcomes of a battle with PTSD. The symptoms of PTSD can force veterans to act much differently than they did before heading off to war. PTSD creates a heightened state of physiological arousal. If a soldier worked in construction prior to the war, they might find it hard to deal with the noise and chaos of a work site. In this situation, it’s hard for them to do what they used to do as a civilian. The inability to leave the military
life behind them is what obstructs the transition more than anything.

“This can really inhibit functioning,” O’connor said. “This make it hard to work anywhere.”

It’s this lack of normalcy that makes the transition from soldier to civilian so difficult. Where veterans used to find comfort and familiarity, they now find danger and harm. The popular opinion among people unfamiliar with PTSD is simply to force veterans to face these traumas head on. This idea is similar to how people deal with fears of heights or spiders.

“But trauma is more complicated than spiders,” O’connor said. “They have changes in how they think about themselves, about other people and about the world.”

And this is where PTSD separates itself from other psychological conditions. These veterans have lived through life or death situations. At the time the trauma occured, it was eat or be eaten. They had to move quickly past what happened for the good of their comrades. They didn’t have the time to sit back and have normal reactions to what was happening. That emotional reaction gets postponed, and that’s when PTSD finds its way into an already brittle psychosis.

“There are emotions that need to be felt that are not complete yet,” O’connor said. “Those emotions need to be completed.”

Acceptance of this natural emotional complex is a difficult thing. Military culture often frowns upon this reaction to trauma; they view it as a weakness. This leaves veterans struggling to cope. Then, civilian society is just as suffocating. Finding a job is difficult, even for those who have dealt with their PTSD. Employers are misinformed about the condition and turn vets away. Often times, soldiers begin to self-medicate, using alcohol and other substances to deal with their emotional imbalance. Then, the drinking begins to drive the PTSD.

“It can really complicate the situation,” O’connor said. “We can’t help them work on the trauma when they are in this medically dangerous condition.”

The things veterans carry are burdensome. They carry a load that no one else can carry for them. People around them often don’t know how to make the situation any better. The problem is isolation. Veterans rely as much on the help of people like O’connor and Marks as they do on civilians who don’t understand the condition. With nearly 200,000 soldiers struggling with PTSD, there can be no shortage of help for them.

“Vets are people having normal reactions to abnormal situations,” O’connor said. “They need our aid and support. They need our help.”