Now, post-traumatic stress is the fourth-most diagnosed psychiatric disorder in the United States, with 28 million expected to suffer from it in their lifetimes.
Everyone knows — or thinks they know — what PTSD is. It’s so often referred to that it’s become a kind of shorthand in the United States for the wreckage of more than 13 years of nonstop war.
As former Marine David Morris put it, “Even if you don’t have it, people assume you do.”
Morris nearly died in a roadside bomb explosion in Iraq in 2007. At the time, he was no longer a Marine but an embedded journalist.
Two years went by after that brush with death, and many other close calls, before he found himself sitting in a movie theater in 2009 watching a scene of a bomb blowing up a car. He blacked out and woke up in the lobby, frantically checking people’s hands to see if they had weapons.
Morris’ new book, “The Evil Hours,” isn’t only about his experience with PTSD. He explores rarely discussed research about trauma resulting from sexual assault and natural disasters, and delves into sometimes controversial treatments of PTSD.
He also examines the medical community’s historically slow understanding of PTSD. Psychiatry didn’t formally recognize the condition until 1980, even though emotional trauma was first documented in 1866 in London by a researcher collecting stories of people who witnessed railway accidents.
Trauma happens when people “catch a surprise glimpse” of death, “the coming annihilation not only of the body but the mind but also, seemingly, of the world,” Morris writes.
Trauma kills a person’s sense of time. There’s life before and life after the traumatic event, and perceptions of reality are often constantly looped and tangled up in an injured memory.
Though therapy and drugs can ease symptoms, there’s no cure for post-traumatic stress.
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A more effective treatment
Morris interviewed other researchers examining prolonged exposure and found that in some cases it exacerbates PTSD symptoms. But he also notes that prolonged exposure is one of the most researched treatments for PTSD and has helped many. It just didn’t work for him.
Morris made progress with cognitive processing therapy, which allows a patient to talk about feelings they have about an experience without having to recount the actual incident.
That kind of therapy allows, for example, a woman who feels like she caused her own rape to ask aloud if that is really true. It blasts the “just-world” fallacy — “Good things happen to good people, and a bad thing happened to me, therefore I must be bad.”
It worked as a kind of first aid, Morris said. It helped him confront pain without re-experiencing it too vividly.
In “The Evil Hours,” Morris writes that his mind can imagine just about any scenario. He can rewind events in his life, in history. He can imagine the Iraq war never happening, wars before Iraq never taking place, he and his girlfriend never splitting.
But he can’t imagine never being in that exploding Humvee in Iraq.
He doesn’t really want to.
It’s not just something that happened, or an event he lives with. Like hundreds of thousands of others who have PTSD, it’s made him who he is.
