The United States Military is the largest military force on the planet, billions of dollars invested in ships, tanks, guns, ammo, protective vests, all used to make our soldiers bodies safe; but what about their minds? The immediate response that comes to mind, “Well they give them helmets!” yes this is true, but a helmet protects your head, not your thoughts, emotions, and personality; those are all held in your mind. PTSD, one of the most misunderstood disorders in our world to date, still with no evidence to date to definitively point to one event or trauma that will give a person PTSD. This is one of the largest reasons that there is not a standardized treatment for PTSD across the world or even our own country, leaving us with the question of why it is not being more seriously researched, especially in military funding. Since the Vietnam War the number of reported and diagnosed PTSD cases and steadily risen at an astronomical rate. With the military and defense budget as large as it is, scientific breakthroughs like new drugs that could prevent PTSD from occurring in the first place, and findings like Dr. Perl’s research on C.T.E. concussions leading to a higher probability of PTSD occurring, there are enough research worthy theories on the disorder to push the military and government invest more into research to protect soldiers and prevent PTSD. 

PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, was first reported in a combat scenario as “shell-shock” in World War One. Many believed what we now call PTSD was depression, something that people could be sent to the insane asylum for if diagnosed. During this era, mental disorders were looked at as a defect, like something was wrong with the person to their core, making this theory of “shell-shock” better than saying a person was going to be afflicted for life. Doctors at first believed that the condition would go away after the thick of combat was over, we now know that is not the case. As breakthroughs in medicine continue to occur each day we see a continuing growth in our understanding of disorders that have to do with the mind, including PTSD. The closest disorder to PTSD that we currently know about is depression, making many scientists, researchers, and doctors alike look towards treatments and drugs for depression to double as PTSD treatments. This is the logical step, look at a similar disease/disorder, depression, to combat this new and little understood disease/disorder, PTSD, but what if what we know, or don’t know, about the more commonly understood disease/disorder is not completely correct? 

Through research on drugs to help with and combat depression, important drug breakthroughs in relation to PTSD have been found. In her TEDx talk Rebecca Brachman explains, “We get so used to looking at something for this one use that we cannot see this thing being used for something else” (Brachman). Brachman is a pioneer in the field of preventative psychopharmacology, drugs that prevent mental illnesses, by using prophylactic drugs, or paravaccines, that prevent mental illnesses from happening in the first place. Brachman and her team’s first definitive finding is the drug “Calypsol”, more commonly known as Ketamine. This drug has been around for many years, more commonly used as an anesthetic this drug is exactly the kind of drug that she was referring to when saying we cannot see things being used for another use. What does this have to do with PTSD and prevention? This drug has been proven by Brachman and many scientists from all over the globe to prevent depression in mice due to large amounts of stress with just a small injection lasting over a period of weeks at a time. The unique part about this drug in particular is its ease of introduction and production. Ketamine is already FDA approved, it is accepted as a useful drug all over the world and it is listed as an essential drug by the World Health Organization. Without the need for human trials, initial labs and research fees, this drug could be the first paravaccine for a mental illness in the world. Brachman’s research can be verified for its applicability to the United States Military by the Marine Resiliency Study conducted by Dr. Dewleen G Baker. According to the Marine Resiliency Study conducted by Dr. Baker the primary goal of the study was to first, “identify the individual, social, and deployment factors that predict trajectories of mental health response, particularly PTSD” and secondly to develop a: “broader multi-system understanding of the phenomenology of adaptation to stress” (Baker). This study shows that even one of the most highly trained branches in our armed forces still suffers greatly each day and each battle with the terrors and stress of PTSD. Due to the findings of the study and Dr. Baker’s study, the United States Military would be willing to fund this drug because it can be used in every soldier, nurse, and doctor in the military with no damage done to people who will not see any battle or anything that could cause PTSD. This drug is just like a vaccine we get when we are children, we don’t wait to get Tuberculosis to treat it, we get a vaccine that will prevent it from ever affecting us. With medicinal breakthroughs and discoveries about brain injury in general, we come closer to a cure for mental illnesses and disorders alike each day. One of these recent discoveries about brain injury comes from Dr. Daniel Perl in an article written by Robert F. Worth of the New York Times. In his article “What if PTSD is More Physical Than Psychological?” he reports some of the more intriguing parts of Perl’s research. One major finding that Perl found, “…chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., caused dementia in NFL players” (Worth) then leading Perl to check brain slides of several veterans who suffered similar concussing injuries, “Several veterans who died from blasts or other injuries would have eventually developed C.T.E.” (Worth) C.T.E. is a condition one develops after repetitive head trauma, leading to a destructive protein being produced in your brain, many shorten the explanation and simply call it a C.T.E. concussion.  Some drugs are designed for preventive care, like the one addressed by Brachman, some are made in hopes of a cure after the fact, much like brain injury there is no one side to be fully funded now. There are a variety of claims about what may cause PTSD, whether it is the result of a physical injury or if it is the product of emotional stress, but at least in our military these men and women afflicted by PTSD deserve recognition. 

Currently we face challenges towards preventive and protective care of PTSD, because of this our military personnel suffer social stigma due to Hollywood movies portraying most military personnel returning with PTSD, which is inaccurate. Authors Irit and Jakob Keynan explain, “A salient example for this discrimination is their exclusion from eligibility to receiving the Purple Heart (PH) medal” (Keynan), essentially stating that it is only due to this overplayed Hollywood example leads to a stigma which keeps these men and women from gaining the recognition they deserve. This inaccuracy has placed them in a situation where PTSD is often seen as a normalcy or not as severe as it really is. Recent breakthroughs in PTSD research is leading to an argument that these men and women diagnosed with PTSD should be eligible for the Purple Heart for hardship after battle and for difficulty in reintroduction to civilian life. If C.T.E. concussions, technically a wound in the line of duty, are proven to be a cause of PTSD, the path will be more clear for these men and women to get the recognition they deserve for their service. C.T.E. concussions and all concussions that “mTBI among returning service members range from 15.2% to 22.8%” (McKee, Robinson) that is almost 320,000 service members that are returning with mTBI, or Mild Traumatic Brain Injuries. These are usually the type of injuries that lead to C.T.E. if an actual concussion is not actually received. For many veterans, recognition is not what they want, it is not why they joined the armed forces, but the recognition they do receive they earn, and as civilians we should fight for their right to recognition of honorable service, especially when injuries that they receive in normal combat can lead to a lifetime of hardship.

When we think about what to do about a situation so often we get caught up in the present and assume everything will be the same tomorrow. When thinking about something as complex as PTSD one must think about what can be discovered tomorrow, but to do this we need to come together as a nation and as a world and create a universal plan to treatment for this disorder. In Christopher Frueh’s book “Assessment and Treatment Planning for PTSD,” he begins his fifth chapter by talking about his team’s unique approach to PTSD assessment, “We generally recommend a top-down approach to assessing psychopathology” (Frueh 109). Essentially, Frueh and his team have created a system where they test every person showing any signs of PTSD, the top larger part, then narrow down through the steps to see who has PTSD, and the severity. He has written a multitude of articles and books explaining disorders of the brain and now, with his team, he has come up with a comprehensive assessment method which simultaneously tests for severity of PTSD. With Frueh’s research we can definitively identify those who do have PTSD consistently we must come together once more and create a treatment plan for those affected. While we invest in method and advertise it, we must still be investing in research towards preventative and protective measures to, hopefully, eradicate this disorder from our military and from survivors of extreme emotional and physical trauma. Many people, especially in the United States, become weary when someone suggests raising the military budget, but if we invest in the military for research now, we may take off the burden of later expensive treatments. 

With growing global turmoil increasing each day we see a trend in the politics trying to avoid greater military spending to increase spending in areas such as education, healthcare, etc. The key to the idea of the military introducing this idea of preventive care and more protection for our soldiers will only increase spending in this field, which angers many people in the United States especially. Media platforms like the Anti-Media News Desk put out propaganda against higher military budgets and call for spending that will accelerate our country’s progression as a nation. These platforms put out resolutions such as “simply” cutting the military budget because we don’t need to fight the world’s wars, this may be true, but this is no simple task. The United States has put themselves in the position to be the world’s military, we are supposed to come to the rescue every time a threat is posed, but when platforms like this say, “The military budget is the money spent each year not to defend the United States, but to enrich the military-industrial complex” (Anti-Media News Desk) they do not fully understand what the military-industrial complex does, not only for our soldiers, but for our economy as a whole. The military-industrial complex that they talk about contains dollars spent on research to better protect our soldiers, which translates to breakthroughs in science and medicine for the rest of the country and the world. The drugs that prevent PTSD and depression, the vests and research into head trauma would not be at the point they are if it were not for this spending. Yes, the spending has a large part to do with global wars, but as a country we are too far in to say we will no longer fight these wars, and as a nation it is our responsibility to support any spending to help protect those who protect us. 

“In earlier wars, it was called ‘soldier's heart,’ ‘shell shock,’ or ‘combat fatigue’” (VA on PTSD). It does not matter what you call it, as long as you recognize that it is there and that it deserves to be researched more, if not only for our soldiers, but for the whole world. If there were to be a cure to PTSD found today, it would help hundreds of thousands of natural disasters survivors, sexual assault victims, and military personnel across the globe. There is applicability in our civilian world if we have no tie to the military, if the cure or the key to prevention was found it would not only be good for those affected and image of the military, it would also be good for the economy with the need for production and distribution. There will always be naysayers, people that say that it doesn’t exist, it’s just an excuse. People that talk this way haven’t met the “more than 200,000 Vietnam War veterans still have PTSD” (Sifferlin), people suffering with this disorder for over forty years, but maybe these people will meet the, “13% of Iraq or Afghanistan veterans” (Sifferlin) who are suffering today with this affliction. There is never an easy answer, not in the civilian world, the military world, or the world of medicine but there is usually a direction that we can go in that is more correct than the other. PTSD is a damaging disorder that separates people from their family, from their community and even themselves sometimes, leading to drug abuse, mental breaks, and much more. With the medical environment changing and gaining momentum on this topic, now is the time to capitalize on the research needed to eradicate PTSD for good. 
