Researchers at Oxford University hypothesized that playing Tetris after witnessing violence would sap some of the cognitive resources the brain would normally rely on to form memories. A well-structured study in the journal PLoS One confirmed the finding–Tetris acted like a ‘cognitive vaccine’ against traumatic memory. Memory research suggests that there’s about a 6-hour window immediately after witnessing trauma during which memory formation can be disrupted. The results of this study indicate that if you happen to have Tetris or a game like it handy during those six hours, it’s the cure for what ails you.”
— Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About - David Disalvo - Brainspin - True/Slant (via pianississimo)
Adjustment after the Virginia Tech Shooting: Resource Loss and Gain »
Abstract -
Unfortunately, many individuals will be exposed to traumatic events during their lifetime. The experience of loss and gain of valued resources may represent important predictors of psychological distress following these experiences. The current study examined the extent to which loss and gain of interpersonal and intrapersonal resources (e.g., hope, intimacy) predicted psychological distress among college women following the mass shooting at Virginia Tech (VT). Participants were 193 college women from whom preevent psychological distress and social support data had been obtained. These women completed surveys regarding their psychological distress, coping, and resource loss and gain 2- and 6-months after the VT shooting. Structural equation modeling supported that resource loss predicted greater psychological distress 6 months after the shooting whereas resource gain was weakly related to lower levels of psychological distress. The study also revealed that social support and psychological distress prior to the shooting predicted resource loss, and social support and active coping with the shooting predicted resource gain. Implications of the results for research examining the roles of resource loss and gain in posttrauma adjustment and the development of interventions following mass trauma are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)
Full Citation -
Littleton, H. L., Axsom, D., Grills-Taquechel, A. E. (2009). Adjustment following the mass shooting at Virginia Tech: The roles of resource loss and gain. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. Vol 1(3), 206-219
How One Army Town Copes With Post- Traumatic Stress - TIME »
In retrospect, disneyland wasn’t an ideal family-vacation spot for Mark Waddell, a Navy SEAL commander whose valor in combat hid the fact that he was suffering from severe mental trauma. The noise of the careening rides, the shrieking kids—everything roused Waddell to a state of hypervigilance typical of his worst days in combat. When an actor dressed as Goofy stuck his long, doggy muzzle into his face, Waddell recalls, “I wanted to grab Goofy by the throat.”
It has long been taboo in military cultures for soldiers to complain about the invisible wounds of war. After a distinguished career as a SEAL commando, Waddell reached his breaking point following the worst disaster in SEAL history, in June 2005: a Chinook helicopter filled with eight SEALs and eight Army aviators was shot down while trying to rescue four comrades trapped by a Taliban ambush in the Kunar Mountains in Afghanistan. Waddell, who was stationed at the unit’s base in Virginia Beach, had the agonizing task of sorting through the remains of his dead men—young warriors he had fought beside, mentored and led into battle. He also had to tell their families of the deaths. One wife, he recalls, “just ran away from me, ran down the street. I could understand.” By Waddell’s reckoning, he attended more than 64 memorial services for his friends and comrades in arms. “Finally,” says Waddell, “I raised my hand and said I needed help.” The doctors’ diagnosis: Waddell was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—known in previous conflicts as combat fatigue.
For Waddell, the diagnosis was a long time in coming. Several years earlier, his wife Marshéle Carter Waddell and their three kids had noticed that everyday things like a whining vacuum cleaner could trigger his rages. Even his kids riled him. “I’d come back from stepping over corpses with their entrails hanging out, and my kids would be upset because their TiVo wasn’t working,” he recalls. Arriving home from one combat mission, Waddell insisted on sleeping with a gun under his pillow. Another night, he woke up from a nightmare with his fingers wrapped around his wife’s throat, her face turning blue. Marshéle had to change the sheets every morning because of her husband’s night sweats. “I had an emergency evacuation plan for myself and the family,” says Marshéle. “You feel physically unsafe.”
At 48, now retired from the Navy and living in Colorado, Waddell is a thoughtful, good-humored man with a quick, catlike energy. After years on the clandestine side of combat, the idea of sharing secrets—especially those of a personal nature—doesn’t come easily to him. But as agonizing as it is to relive the experiences of his ongoing bout with PTSD, he and Marshéle agreed to talk to TIME in an effort to sound the alarm for what has become a broader problem: the vast number of men and women returning from punishing stretches in Iraq and Afghanistan bearing the psychological scars of war. “By speaking out,” says Waddell, “maybe it will help someone’s son or daughter in the forces.”
PTSD wasn’t recognized as an illness until the 1980s, but it has been around for as long as men have been killing one another. Its symptoms include the abuse of alcohol and other drugs, an overall emotional numbness punctuated by outbursts of rage, severe depression and recurring nightmares. In extreme cases, it can lead to suicide or murder. One military doctor described PTSD’s symptoms as “going from zero to combat speed in nothing flat.”
The incidence of PTSD is on the rise as two wars drag on. In April, a Rand Corp. study concluded that 1 out of almost every 5 military service members on combat tours—about 300,000 so far—returns home with symptoms of PTSD or major depression. “Anyone who goes through multiple deployments is going to be affected,” says Dr. Matthew Friedman, director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for PTSD. But nearly half of these cases, according to the Rand study, go untreated because of the stigma that the military and civil society attach to mental disorders. The suspect in the Fort Hood shootings, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, counseled returning vets with PTSD, though there is no proof that this work unleashed his demons. But as Antonette Zeiss, deputy chief of mental-health services for Veterans Affairs says, “Anyone who works with PTSD clients and hears their stories will be profoundly affected.”
Down the road from the Waddells’ home lies Colorado Springs, home to Fort Carson and the 4th Infantry Division, a spearhead in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Like those cycling in and out of Fort Hood, many soldiers at Fort Carson have endured at least two tours of duty, some three or more, sometimes with only a few months sandwiched in for them to reacquaint themselves with their families. Since 2007, eight men—all from a single combat-weary 500-man infantry battalion nicknamed Lethal Warriors—have been charged with carrying out a string of murders and attempted murders in Colorado Springs. So far, four have been convicted. In a drive-by shooting, a young couple was killed while hanging up signs for a garage sale; a woman was run over by a car and repeatedly stabbed; a learning-disabled teenage girl was taken into the woods, was raped and had her throat slashed. One soldier was shot five times by drinking buddies from his battalion; another was robbed of $20 by a fellow soldier and then shot point-blank. During the trials of these infantrymen, their lawyers claimed that prior to carrying out the crimes, they had all displayed classic symptoms of PTSD during and after their combat tours in Iraq. Other soldiers fall into a spiral of depression and kill themselves—so many, in fact, that idyllic Colorado Springs has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. (Army figures show that 76% of soldiers who committed suicide this year had served at least one tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.) As Colorado Springs police commander Fletcher Howard cautions, “If a guy comes home disturbed from Iraq, he’s going to close the door. We don’t know what we don’t know.”
Soldiers who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan may not experience the hostility from society upon their return to the U.S. that Vietnam vets did. But they encounter something that psychologists say is nearly as disorienting: America has found ways to distract itself from the fact that it has dispatched 1.6 million service members to two wars and kept them fighting for far longer than the duration of World War II. This struck Waddell while he was at a mall, when a shopper asked him how he broke his leg. “Iraq,” Waddell answered. The reply: “Was it a car wreck or a cycle wreck?” Colorado Springs psychologist Kelly Orr, who is treating the ex—Navy SEAL, says, “We get all excited when Johnny goes marching off to war, and then we forget about him a few days later when our favorite football team loses a game.” This, says Orr, adds to a returnee’s well of anger and loneliness.
Waddell became an expert at hiding his PTSD symptoms from his fellow SEALs. Despite his wife’s constant pleas for him to seek help, Waddell’s standard reply was, “I don’t have a problem. You do.” It took a full six months after the SEALs’ disaster in Afghanistan before Waddell admitted to Marshéle that he was hurting. “Training inoculates you against trauma. The first time you see someone dead, it’s a shock. By the 10th time, you’re walking over dead bodies and making sick jokes about what they had for breakfast. But all that stress accumulates.” Says Marshéle: “Mark was like the captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. He had compartmentalized everything beautifully, but all these compartments were filling up with water. The ship was sinking, and he was the last to know.”
When Waddell finally sought treatment, he was ordered to report to a Norfolk, Va., mental-health facility at 5 a.m., wearing his civvies—as though, he mused, it was taboo for anyone in uniform to admit they might be cracking up. As in other areas, the military is undermanned when it comes to mental-health experts. The Army reckons it has only about 400 psychiatrists handling more than half a million troops. That may have been one reason the Army was reluctant to nudge a strangely performing Hasan, who had trained as a shrink, out of the service: it needed him. Faced with a wave of service members coming back from combat in anguish, the Pentagon has made the diagnosis and treatment of posttraumatic disorders a top priority. Every battalion, especially in combat zones, is now supposed to have a mental-health specialist.
Care varies from base to base. The previous commander at Fort Carson, Major General Mark Graham, became an advocate for improved mental-health care for soldiers after he lost two sons in military service—one in Iraq and the other to suicide. At Fort Carson, the base hospital is expanding its facilities for mental-health and family therapy, with regular counseling sessions for soldiers and their spouses. But it takes a while for a general’s orders to trickle down to the ranks, where platoon leaders are supposed to steel their troops, physically and mentally, against the enemy. Says Colonel Jimmie Keenan, commander of Fort Carson’s hospital: “I’d be a fool to say that all the stigma is gone. The marked difference is what’s being put in place to deal with this. A soldier has to be able to come forward.”
When Sergeant Clint Hollibaugh was transferring from Iraq back to Oklahoma, he sat through the obligatory briefings on PTSD with one eye on the clock. “It was the usual stuff: ‘Don’t kick the cat, don’t kill your wife,’” he says. Like many service members, he feared that any confession of mental trauma would delay his homecoming. However mixed up Hollibaugh felt after being the sole survivor of an ambush, he believed that it was nothing that could not be fixed by a burger, a few beers and sex. “Besides,” he says, “I thought I was fine.” But several weeks later, Hollibaugh woke up outside his house; he had been patrolling the yard while sleepwalking. He kept a gun in every room of his house, one of them under the mattress. When his neighbor started firing off a shotgun, Hollibaugh instinctively leaped off the porch and began crawling through the grass while his wife, since divorced, looked on in horror and pity. “It took my family to say, ‘Hey, you’re messed up. Fix it.’” After drugs for sleep and with therapy, Hollibaugh began to feel better.
There are no hard-and-fast rules for treating PTSD, but studies show that stricken veterans who have a strong social network of family and friends tend to bounce back faster. For Waddell, the treatment has been a combination of techniques designed to calm the storm of his wartime memories and his emotional responses to them. It involves everything from drugs to cathartic sessions of therapy to mapping his brain waves. It also helps for Waddell to vocalize his traumatic experiences, so he and Marshéle often speak to church and community groups about PTSD. It can take years before the symptoms start to ebb.
And, says Marshéle, “you need an environment where the warrior can be vulnerable.” Typically, that’s not a military base. Waddell speaks of what he terms a “break in the covenant” between those who volunteer to fight and the society that sent them into battle and then forgot about them. “It’s not enough to give soldiers free tickets to NASCAR races,” he says. “It has to be something more, a deeper way of honoring the sacrifices these men and women have made.”
The “covenant” is slowly being restored in Colorado Springs. Members of the clergy keep an eye out for troubled military families in their congregations. Neighbors help with babysitting so that a couple can get reacquainted after a long tour of duty. Nonprofit groups have stepped in to give veterans and active-duty service members the kind of confidential help they feel they cannot get on base. On the assumption that a soldier is more likely to reveal buried traumas to someone who has also experienced combat, the Pikes Peak Behavioral Health Group has lined up vets who can steer the combat-bruised troops through their personal troubles and the VA’s cavernous bureaucracy.
For Colonel George Brandt, behavioral-health chief at the base hospital, a cure means “being able to get on the floor and play with your kids. Then you know you’re home.” For Waddell, it may take longer. He says, “Even though Marshéle and I are still in a dark valley, we haven’t built our house here. We’re just passing through.”
The Psychology of Hasan: The Ft. Hood Shooter | World of Psychology »
By JOHN M GROHOL PSYD
November 9, 2009
I’ve held off in writing anything about the tragic Ft. Hood shooting, allowing some time for details to emerge and for emotions to settle. Random acts of violence always leave us all scratching our heads, but sometimes the violence seems so extreme, the act so irrational, one can’t help but turn and ask, “Why did he do it?”
Major Nidal Malik Hasan is now apparently conscious and talking in his hospital bed, after being shot multiple times by Sgt. Kim Munley, a civilian police officer, who selflessly and heroically put herself in harm’s way in order to save countless of others’ lives. Munley is in stable but good condition and is very upbeat, according to news reports. Virginia Tech helped guide Munley’s aggressive response to Hasan’s shootings. “The lesson from Virginia Tech was, don’t wait for backup but move to the target and eliminate the shooter,” says Chuck Medley, chief of Fort Hood’s emergency services, telling the Christian Science Monitor. “It requires courage and it requires skill.”
It’ll be interesting to hear what Hasan has to say, but don’t be surprised if he sheds little new light on his actions. Criminals often justify their acts with rationalizations that make rational sense only to them.
What is clear is that Major Hasan was a troubled, conflicted individual. Some are calling him a terrorist, which means, literally, the systematic use of terror (a state of intense, extreme fear oranxiety), especially as a means of coercion. I’m not certain what Hasan was hoping to coerce by his actions — perhaps an end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? — and I’m not sure he was very systematic about it, since he chose a place where most of have never been, seen or knew much about (an Army training camp). But indeed, if his aim was to induce terror, I’m certain he was successful that day.
Hasan’s Increasing Opposition to the Wars
Hasan increased his opposition to the wars as his military career — and the wars — progressed (he entered the military before the wars). According to the most recent New York Times article, during the past five years, Hasan also began openly opposing the wars on religious grounds. But amongst the rank of doctors, opposition to war is not uncommon. After all, doctors see the bloody reality of war in their work every day. And Hasan — in his work as a psychiatrist as someone who sometimes saw and talked to veterans who returned from combat — likely understood the psychological and emotional toll such combat can have on a human being.
The New York Times also reports that over the past decade, Hasan had increasingly turned to his own religion, Islam, for answers. This is not uncommon for a person to do, especially after he lost both his parents within 3 years of one another in 2001. Combined with the terrorist attacks on the U.S. in 2001, instead of making Hasan more pro-American, it apparently turned him more pro-Islam. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be much an issue for most people. But it certainly could become an issue when you’re fighting two wars against people who are primarily Muslim.
The heart of the matter is this, however — Muslims serve with honor throughout the military, in society and in our government every day. While many of them object to the wars — just as many, many Americans in general do — most of them don’t take forceful, violent action with their objections.
Hasan Lacked Support, Conflicted About His Religion
Hasan was different. He psychologically had difficulty with accepting his conflicting roles as a Muslim and as someone who would be called upon to heal those who are actively fighting Muslims. (As a psychiatrist, while he may have indeed been in a combat zone, it’s unlikely he would’ve seen any direct action himself.) When most of us are seriously conflicted about major decisions in our lives, most of us take actions to find a solution to the conflict — we work it out with others, we talk to a professional, we seek guidance in our faith, friends and family.
Hasan apparently didn’t have a lot of friends and also doesn’t seem to have had much contact with his family. Social support — so important in keeping us connected with society and those around us — seemed to be seriously lacking in this man’s life. He sought others’ counsel and friendship, but apparently did little with the advice he was given and had only a few acquaintances.
Others have suggested motives and behaviors of Hasan that they could not have any direct knowledge of (for instance, how he worked with his patients he saw as a psychiatrist). I’ll leave such speculation where it belongs. Dr. Peter Breggin makes the ridiculous assertion that psychotherapists don’t get burned out, so one of the reasons that led to Hasan’s irrational actions was the fact that he was just another pill-prescribing, uncaring psychiatrist:
The psychiatrists [at Walter Reed] had no interest in anything except medicating their patients.
Modern psychiatry is not about counseling and empowering people. It’s about controlling and suppressing them, and that’s a dismal affair for patients and doctors alike. The armed forces have been taken in by the false claims of modern psychiatry.
By contrast, it’s not depressing to do psychotherapy or counseling. As therapists, it’s inspiring when people entrust their feelings and their life stories to us. There is no burn out when therapists feel concern and empathy for their patients and help them to find the strength and direction to reclaim their lives.
I’m not sure where Dr. Breggin is getting his information, but The New York Times noted that Hasan’s primary duty at Ft. Hood was the assessment of soldiers before deployment. In other words, Hasan wasn’t prescribing many medications. He was trying to determine the psychological fitness of soldiers before they left for combat duty. I find it a little unseemly to use a tragedy such as this to push one’s anti-psychiatry agenda (no matter how well-intended).
Hasan’s Steady Escalation Toward Action
In hindsight, the progression seems to make sense as he appeared to step up his religious observation and public objections to the war. One might say that the Internet postings attributed to him, if authenticated, were really cries for help and to be heard — “Look at me, I hate your war and am a loaded pistol just waiting to go off. Let me out of the service.” But investigators hadn’t progressed very far in examining whether to take the postings seriously and if they were even made by Major Hasan.
Between the on-base harassment for his religion, his denial of a request to be released from military service early (although it’s unclear he ever actually formally tried to do this), and his upcoming deployment to the theater of operations in the Middle East, combined with his own anti-war views and unapologetic religious beliefs all seemed to have led to this man committing the most tragic and irrational act imaginable.
As I’ve argued previously, such acts can never be fully understood or explained because at the core of it, they are irrational acts. Many people object to the war, but virtually none of us kill others to make that point. Many people, when they feel like they have no way out of their life and have lost all hope, turn to suicide. But for some reason, a very tiny percentage of people take that inward anger (depression) and turn it outward, against others, in an act like this one.
This isn’t to apologize for Major Hasan’s actions or try to minimize their impact. Indeed, what Hasan has done is to likely change the very way the military looks at its own base security and how it handles soldiers internally who seem to have significant issues that are not being successfully resolved. And perhaps — just maybe — it will again reinforce to the heads of our armed services, the vital impact mental health plays in soldiers’ lives. While it’s possible nothing could have changed the outcome of this particular tragedy, perhaps there are things we can learn to help prevent future such tragedies occurring.
Read more at: Fort Hood Gunman Gave Signals Before His Rampage
Read more at: The Fort Hood Shooter: A Different Psychiatric Perspective
