Word Games

Military leaders and psychiatrists are debating whether to change post traumatic stress from a disorder to an injury. Their hope is that fewer soldiers will feel stigmatized by acknowledging post traumatic stress from combat and will seek treatment. Less stigma, more treatment is good but it begs the larger question: why are these service members exposed to this trauma?

The final graf of the linked article says it best:

If the Army really wanted to protect soldiers, it would limit the number of tours that troops are permitted to do in Afghanistan, Bessel van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University said. Medical studies have suggested that a soldier’s resilience is depleted with each battlefield tour. “As long as you have repeated deployments, you will have devastating effects on people,” he said.