Why Drone Operators, Non-Combat Soldiers, and Peace Corps Volunteers Get PTSD | Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger investigates PTSD in US troops and finds war may not be the root cause, but rather the painful transition from platoon communalism to the fractured individualism and social divides of modern society. Junger's latest book is "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging" ().
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Transcript - PTSD is a confusing phrase I think for a lot of people. I mean first of all it’s not just something that soldiers get. It’s not just something that happens at war. Life is traumatic. There are car accidents, children die of cancer. I mean all kinds of horrible things happen to civilians and they wind up with a long term traumatic reaction which is just as crippling as what could happen to soldiers in combat. So it’s important to remember this is just the human condition that we’re talking about. When I was covering war in the nineties I had never heard of the term PTSD. I didn’t know that there were long term psychological consequences to trauma. And so when I came back from Afghanistan in 2000, I was there a year before 9/11 with the Northern Alliance under Ahmad Shah Massoud. I spent two months in the north and back then the Taliban were a real military force. I mean they had fighter planes. They had an air force. They had tanks. They had everything. And so fighting the Taliban was a really daunting proposition and we got hammered a few times.
And I came back to New York pretty altered actually but I didn’t know it. I was a young man, I didn’t think anything really affected me. And I was fine until one day I went down into the subway and unexpectedly I had the first panic attack of my life. Everything was going to kill me. The trains were going too fast and were going to jump the rails and somehow plow into me. There were too many people on the platform and they were going to somehow turn on me and attack me. The lights were too bright. Everything was too loud. I knew I wasn’t in danger but it felt like I was in enormous danger and I was absolutely terrified. And I finally ran out of there and walked to wherever I was going. And I kept having panic attacks in small places where I was confined and couldn’t leave. For months later I had no idea it was connected to combat. I mean I wasn’t in a situation like that in combat so I didn’t know that they were connected. But in fact it was. And I was having what’s called short term acute post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a survival adaptation.
I was having all the reactions that you want to have if your life’s been in danger. You want to react to sudden noises. You don’t want to be in situations where you don’t have control. Small confined spaces with too many people, too much going on. That’s a dangerous situation. You want to be a little bit depressed. It keeps you quiet and out of harm’s way. You want to be quick to anger, it makes you prepared to fight. All the things we associated with PTSD have real survival value in a situation of great danger. The problem happens when that acute PTSD turns into a long term disorder that can last even someone’s lifetime. And at that point it doesn’t have survival value. It actually has negative value. I mean it gets in the way of leading a healthy life. And that’s chronic long term PTSD. It’s not adaptive. It’s not healthy. It’s the opposite. And that is the problem that America is trying to solve with some of its soldiers. Read Full Transcript Here: .