Female Soldiers PTSD
An update here for my ongoing thread about The Brave New Military. Actually I can't keep up with the number of reports pouring out daily about the bizarre novelties of today's military. But since it's Women's Month:1st, you've heard about women having emotional instability from PMS, but you haven't heard about how much worse that can be from PTSD. This report reveals some new developments in American military history:
Two US Army female soldiers Private Miranda Nichols (left), 18, from Georgia, and Private First Class Leysha Williamson, 27, from Texas, wait in a foxhole during a dawn defensive alert south of Baghdad, 31/3/2003. Photo: AFP
- More females are being thrown into actively fighting battles, killing, and witnessing the horrors of war -- because the military is stretched too thin and because the occupying force can be attacked anywhere anytime. Such tasks were formerly off-limits for female recruits, but now suddenly "routine". The chaos of this occupation has dragged women into the bloody mire of kill-or-be-killed in situations where injuries are severe and where civilians are often killed.
- A consequence of this is PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) where of course warriors do not return home as happy normal people. Instead they return with nightmares, depression, addictions, social alienation, violent outbursts, etc., leading to divorces, unemployment, and suicides. "And studies indicate that many of these women suffer from more pronounced and debilitating forms of PTSD than men."
- More pronounced because more trauma = more stress. The article suggests that many women go into the military in order to escape from traumatic abuse and "adverse environments" (a.k.a., "America") only to encounter new trauma. The military studies cited are genuinely interesting. E.g., PTSD typically follows not from being shot at but rather from having to kill.
- And another sign of our brave post-contemporary times: "One children's book increasingly popular among military families illustrates what the effects of this most recent war might mean for society in the years and even decades to come: Why Is Mommy Like She Is? A Book for Kids About PTSD."
Female GIs Hard Hit by War Syndrome
Female GIs Report Rapes in Iraq War 37 seek aid after alleging sex assaults by U.S. soldiers.
posted by E. Heroux @ 8:22 PM
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