And as women were helping the country to see that no woman asks for rape, Lifton and others were trying to get post-trauma disorder listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The rap group was a tool, too, for rape survivors. They noticed that most victims spoke of it as a life-threatening event, and afterward many experienced a post-traumatic cluster of often severe psychological symptoms. Out of this partnership came an egalitarian, organically created group therapy called the 'rap group,' in which vets began to discuss, in an environment of respect and trust, the things that had happened to them.Īlmost simultaneously, in the early 1970s, the women's movement was looking at a 121 percent increase in rape over the course of the 1960s, and researchers began studying its psychological impact. Disillusioned with the Veterans Administration, which tended to downplay their problems, they contacted Robert Jay Lifton, the Yale psychiatrist known for his work concerning Hiroshima survivors and his study of brainwashing, and told him they needed services. Thompson called their considerable 'psychic leverage' to change the treatment given to returning vets.

In particular, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War used what Hunter S. But they turned soldiers into civilians immediately and let 'em sink or swim.' Psychiatrists noted the incidence of what they called war neurosis, but there was a reluctance to discuss such things in the Cold War years. 'They took Army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life. Army was three times what it had been in World War I, yet Audie Murphy, the finest sharpshooter of the war, described how the Army failed to help returning veterans cope with what they had seen. Experiencing trauma can create permanent changes in the brain, making what one Marine called a 'mind tattoo.' Morris writes of his own experience, 'My survival brain … had wired a protective carapace of memories, many of which had outlived their usefulness.' Though it often resolves itself over time, sufferers can lose years of life to fear, isolation and a disruption in time that makes the past ever-present.ĭuring World War II, the incidence of psychological breakdown in the U.S. Rivers, who ran a hospital for the shell-shocked in WWI Britain and famously treated the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, found that the stress reaction was more severe if the person had been immobilized or helpless.

The Evil Hours by David J. Morris