
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is the brain’s response to an extremely traumatic event that happens in a person’s life.  It often causes closed off relationships with others, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and sometimes brings people to suicide.  This disorder most often occurs with soldiers and veterans, because war has and always will include near-death experiences and/or the deaths of others.  PTSD is triggered solely by a traumatic experience, and though we have only relatively recently started taking it seriously, it has most likely been around since cavemen were alive.  Written accounts of psychological stress after war date back to ancient times.  Achilles, a character in Homer’s The Iliad, loses his best friend and in return, goes into a fit of rage and violence that can be attributed to a psychological injury triggered by his best friend’s death.  The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien recounts just one of the stories of the horrible trauma that soldiers in Vietnam went through.  PTSD has been a problem throughout history, but how it has been treated has differed greatly over the years.

It is hard to recognize that someone has PTSD by just looking at them.  Their trauma is usually suppressed and only comes out at certain times.  Often certain sounds or visuals can trigger a memory in a person with PTSD.  For example, in The Things They Carried, Jimmy Cross might have had flashbacks of Tim Lavender’s death triggered by seeing Martha, the girl he loved because at the time he blamed himself for Lavender’s death because he paid too much attention to her.  Most often, loud noises that mimic gun shots or explosions trigger memories for PTSD patients.  People with the disorder are hypervigilant as if they are still in danger even when they are safe, they can be irritable or hostile, and can just seem uninterested in anything.  They often have insomnia or nightmares that replay the traumatic flashbacks over and over in their sleep.  Often, the only people that recognize the problem, is people that are close to the person.  PTSD is very detrimental to relationships with friends and family, and the person becomes extremely closed off and untrustworthy to others.  People with PTSD, especially soldiers or veterans try to deny help and feel that they are fine, however without proper treatment and help, many are driven deep into depression and some commit suicide.

Historically, PTSD was thought of as a normal response to a traumatic situation.  People experience trauma all the time, and most of the time do not end up with the disorder.  PTSD, however, is much more of a serious problem, and it was not until the civil war that we started to treat it as less of a natural response, and more of a serious issue.  Before the U.S. military got involved in the research of this disorder, an Austrian physicist named Josef Leopold wrote about what he called “nostalgia”.  This paper described symptoms of PTSD such as the feeling of homesickness and sadness, sleep problems, and anxiety.  A doctor during the civil war named Jacob Mendez Da Costa also wrote about this disorder, calling it “Soldier’s heart” or “Irritable heart” where he found symptoms such as a rapid pulse, anxiety, and trouble breathing.  Shell shock was the next name of the disease during World War I and battle fatigue in World War II.  In 1952 the American Psychiatric Association called it gross stress reaction and in 1968 they called it adjustment reaction to adult life.  It wasn’t until the Vietnam war that PTSD was recognized as a disorder and was linked with exposure to traumatic experiences.

Today there is a lot of time and money that goes into diagnosing PTSD and finding ways to mitigate the symptoms.  The Department of Veterans Affairs operates programs to treat PTSD and over a half million Veterans with PTSD were treating in the programs.  New treatments are being made to treat PTSD such as Cognitive Processing Therapy.  Even now we are using new technology such as virtual reality to gain new information about people with PTSD and how we can help them and others.

The Things They Carried tells the story of a man named Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his time in Vietnam.  The title of the story is repeated in the beginning of the story when the narrator talks about what the soldiers carry with them every day.  The narrator talks about the pictures and letters Jimmy carries, ands mentions the weight of each item that is in his rucksack.  The story itself is about how Jimmy and his men react to the death of one of their own, Ted Lavender.  The pictures of the girl that Jimmy loves triggers the traumatic memory of Lavender’s death.  He remembers very specific details of the traumatic situation, like the weight of the items and the exact thoughts.  These are all signs of PTSD and it was during a time period where PTSD was just starting to be recognized and treated.  The story talked about how all of the soldiers acted during the death of Lavender.  Although they were sad, they all made jokes about it to hide what they were actually feeling.  Cross promises himself that he will no longer show any more emotion, because that is what got Ted Lavender killed.  The title shows its double meaning because the things they carried weren’t just physical items.  The soldiers carried around heavy sadness and emotion that they refused to let loose.  Instead they kept it inside and told no one.  Later on O’Brien talks about the memories and how he can never forget what happened.  He tells of smells and sights that never leave his memory.  PTSD hurt so many soldiers and only recently have we begun to improve its treatment.  Tim O’Brien does a great job in conveying those feelings into his stories so that the reader can begin to comprehend what he and many others went through and are still going through.