Summer is the season we honor our veterans. There’s Memorial
Day and the 4th of July, but even beyond these holidays, a summer
filled with barbecues and Slip n’ Slides is a time to appreciate the life our
country offers and remember the veterans who make it possible. This summer as
we are remembering our veterans’ contributions, we are forced to confront our
own failures. See, there’s an implicit deal we make as a society with these
people who fight for our freedom – you risk your lives so that we don’t have
to, and in return we as a society will take care of you. With scandals at V.A.
hospitals, we’ve reneged on our end of the deal.
It’s time to recommit to the health of our veterans who
willingly sacrifice so much. Part of this commitment must be on the part of
health systems to work toward making our veterans whole in body and in mind.
But another part must come from you and from me and from everyone who makes a
community of support for returning veterans. It is our responsibility to work
toward understanding the difficult experiences that dot our veterans’ paths to
recovery.
There are two pieces in particular that have become part of
too many vets’ experiences: PTSD and addiction. Too often, these challenges are
seen together. Now we know that vets who struggle with PTSD are also likely
to struggle with addiction. But why? And why do these two come as a pair?
One hypothesis has always been that veterans experiencing
symptoms of PTSD self-medicate with drugs or alcohol to mask or escape from
these symptoms. Interestingly, one
of the most comprehensive studies of vets, PTSD and substance abuse
disorders found support for drugs but not alcohol used as a coping mechanism.
Specifically, the study found that PTSD symptoms predicted a bump in drug use
but didn’t predict a bump in alcohol use.
Another
hypothesis is that vets experience more stress than most people and so have
to put more energy into coping with this stress. If vets have many coping
outlets, for example exercise or family or career or therapy, they may stay
healthy. But if vets are without these other
coping outlets, substance abuse may provide the only relief.
But now, more often, PTSD and addiction are being seen not
necessarily in relation to each other but as two consequences of the same cause.
Not only in PTSD but also in addiction, trauma may be to blame. It’s not only
veterans, but anyone who has experienced trauma, including police officers and
sexually abused individuals and even car crash survivors, who are prone to PTSD
and addiction.
For returning veterans, it
is the power of these overwhelming experiences that create PTSD and it may
be the same power that drives addiction, with or without the two occurring
together. From combat or car crash or abuse, trauma creates addiction.
The disastrous outcome of trauma that leads to PTSD and
addiction can be suicide. For if substance abuse is used as a temporary relief
from symptoms of trauma, then it can seem like suicide is the ultimate escape.
In January 2014, the Department of Veterans Affairs released suicide
data showing that about 22 vets per day take their own lives. While rates
for older vets remain stable, inside these numbers is a 44 percent jump in the
suicide rate for veterans under age 30. In active duty military, deaths by
suicide now
outpace the number of deaths in war zones.
In an
article for the magazine Stars and
Stripes describing the data, Jan Kemp, the VA’s National Mental
Health Director for Suicide Prevention describes the suicide rate in young vets
as, “astronomically high and climbing.” She attributes growing suicides, in
part, to young veterans surviving injuries that might have killed earlier
generations of veterans, leaving today’s returning veterans more traumatized
and more injured than previous returning vets. Pointing out that only 5 of the
22 suicides per day are by veterans being treated in the V.A. health system,
she says, “What we’re seeing is that getting help does matter. Treatment does
work.”
When the mind is overwhelmed by an experience it can’t
process, it becomes ripe for addiction, PTSD and eventually suicide. And in
turn, addiction and PTSD can hint at the terrible experiences our vets have
endured so that we can enjoy barbecues and Slip ‘n Slides. This 4th
of July and beyond, it is our responsibility as a society to respect the impact
of this trauma and to provide the community of support than can help our
veterans release it in a way that does not lead to addiction, PTSD, or suicide.
--
Richard Taite is founder and CEO of Cliffside Malibu,
offering evidence-based, individualized addiction treatment based on the Stages
of Change model. He is also co-author with Constance Scharff
of the book Ending
Addiction for Good.
