[Issue #2] Where Did This Come From?
Mental health from the beginning (with stories from Greek mythology and personal reality)
It was 1980 and the U.S. economy was frail, fraught with turbulent gas prices, a shifting stock market and the guided, amplified awareness of mental health disorders and disease. Over time, mental health became less stigmatized. Though, in the 1980’s, we still didn’t have a thorough understanding of mental health disorders, how they affected us, or where they come from. In 1980, PTSD was added to the third edition of the DSM along with generalized anxiety. 1980 was also the decade of America’s willingness to look at mental health as part of the whole being part of human being.
As a pre cursor to the remainder of this post, I have created an infographic which depicts the approximate timeframes of mental health awareness. (Note: the links at the bottom may not work as expected, so they will also be posted at the end of this essay.)
After the 1990s, the United States Veteran Affairs department began conducting internal tests to collect data regarding PTSD and its implications for combat troops.
But let’s go back. Way back. Beginning with the year 490 BCE, then jumping to the Trojan War with the assistance of the Iliad, the famous text penned by Homer sometime in the 8th century BCE.
Let’s learn some shit using Greek mythology, shall we? (Thanks to the lovely Dr. Kagan for this foundational and relational example of PTSD). We’re taking a journey back to mythical times to gain a better, less abstract understanding of how PTSD became known as such.
In writing the battle of Marathon, Herodotus (a Greek historian who is notable for his investigative research into historical events) tells a story about a soldier who had not suffered any apparent physical wounds to his body, but was struck by blindness. Further in his writing, Herodotus also states to a high-level official that he’s had to dismiss soldiers from the coming battles due to exhaustion from war. It’s now known that “battle fatigue” (PTSD) has been a genuine and distressing mental disorder since (at least) the dawn of human war.
It should be noted that while this first foundational evidence lends to our collective validity of PTSD in days of old, it also undermines trauma incurred by medical practitioners, children, and others deeply connected and affected by war or other traumatic events such as the Black Plague (which wiped out roughly 40% of the European population) or the Dust Bowl (killing 7,000 people and rendering 2 million people homeless).
The Iliad is considered to be one of literature’s greatest works and is. An epic poem which splits the story of the Trojan War into 24 parts, Homer captures only a slice of the war in the Iliad, and the recounting is one of history’s prized lenses. The Trojan War occurred around 1100 BCE. Homer tells tales of war, bloody battles, tragic deaths, and hard losses.
During “the Bronze Age”, which was roughly from 3000 BCE to 1000 BCE, immense civilizations expanded, war continued, cities were founded and razed. The city of Troy was hot and dusty. Looking around, there wasn’t much to see; the well-stewarded landscape now only showcased crumbled stone walls, collapsed chariots with dead horses still attached to them and fires burning in the not so far distance. The horizon was heavy with smoke and smog as funeral pyres burned. It was the last day of the war and it had taken a lot to get there. A lot of friends, lost. A lot of life, missed, spent on the battlefields for glory and treasure.
Sitting around a large warm fire stoked in the open-air of the falling night sky, laughs were heard and celebration ran wild. So did exhaustion. Sickness. Nightmares. Hunger. Pain. Emotions boiled and brewed, mixing into each other and the booze to the point that it became impossible to know which was which anymore. The laughter, the booze, the desire to get away, the homesickness, seeped in and there was probably some semblance of knowing war is bad for the soul.
All the bloodshed, the chaos, even though it lead to the largest win yet, took a toll on those who witnessed it. Armor wasn’t made for feelings. The open-air fire sparked as flecks of warm ash floated by.
Then the tales began.
As Homer tells it, Ajax the Greater suffered a bout of insanity when he was put under a spell by the Goddess Athena, causing Ajax to believe a herd of sheep were his enemies. He slaughtered them all and then died by suicide (if this isn’t fucking PTSD, I don’t know what is).
Further in the Iliad, Homer gives us plenty of other examples showcasing the absurdity and insidiousness of PTSD.
During a lull in the battle for Troy, Agamemnon, the Greek King of Mycea and leader of the Greek Army (commander to the all-important Achilles), took it upon himself to take Achilles’s female slave, Briseis. As a result, Achilles refused to battle for the Greeks until Briseis was returned to him. Agamemnon refused to return Briseis, which left the Greek Army vulnerable to strategic attacks (Achilles had been their quarterback). The Trojan Army took advantage of the chaos and vulnerability created by Achilles’s absence.
The Trojan Army’s leader, Hector, leveraging his position, began a swift assault onto the Greeks, killing Achilles’s best friend, Patroclus. The death of Patroclus was the catalyst, or “trigger”, into Achilles’s violent and murderous behavior. Violent and murderous in the killing of Hector and all those thrown against him. This is the kind of violence that only comes from intense, immense, complex trauma. The kind of violence expected from someone at war.
Back to present-day, our modern brains and technology have changed how we view mental health in general, not just PTSD. It could even be argued that Covid-19 has shifted the ways in which we access mental health help. It’s been centuries (roughly 941 years if we count from 1100 BCE to 2022 CE) since Herodotus and Achilles first illustrated the suffering of trauma and violent behavior of people affected by violence itself (whether witnessing it or as a participant of it) and we’re only just now beginning to shed a collective shame around mental health disorders and PTSD, specifically.
Back in 2004, while on duty as a Security Forces member, I felt an incredible amount of shame when I had to finally tell someone the truth about the depths to which I had been suffering. The process of, in 2004, me getting the help I needed left me feeling more afraid about getting booted from the military, more embarrassed due to my apparent “weaknesses”, and further increased an already exponential amount of shame I’d been feeling since coming out in 1999 or so and having felt lost long before then.
I was active duty Air Force from 2003 through 2009. I deployed twice in that time, once to a prison in Iraq and another to a flight line in Kuwait. The prison deployment left me with much more trauma than the deployment to Kuwait, because the environments were different. My sense of safety was higher in Kuwait - there were fewer threats, and enough time had passed since the worst of the initial onslaught. I carried shame about having such bad trauma from a place a lot of my friends had gone to, and other Airmen I knew had deployed to worse places, like Afghanistan. In one of my initial screening interviews while receiving intensive PTSD treatment at UCLA was “Do I have the right to have this kind of PTSD? It’s not like I kicked in doors and killed people. I didn’t get hit with an IED. I’m not missing any limbs….” Of course, I was a crying wreck while asking this question and it was met with such kindness, it was almost paralyzing. The answer was, yes, I am allowed and definitely do have trauma from my war experiences, even if and even though they were very different than other experiences other people had.
Trauma is subjective. As in, if the worst experience of your life has been a rollover vehicle accident (not a fender bender) and you broke a leg but otherwise, no one got hurt, the event could still potentially become something that can fester, becoming a place of trauma. If the worse experience of your life is not being able to save a buddy while in a war zone, while that’s a different extreme, it’s also outside the realm of what’s deemed a “typical” experience.
War is never a typical experience.
All my drinking and drugging gave me no true reprieve. It didn’t clue me in to the fact that I might be suffering. I only knew I was angry at the entire world. In Iraq, I had come too close for comfort to taking a man’s life. I’d been awakened by screams and fires from prison riots. I couldn’t stop the beat of pistol and machine gun fire in the distance from reverberating inside my nightmares. This went on for several years after I returned home to Colorado. My mother came to visit not long after I returned and during an already restless sleep, a few neighbors shot off some pistol rounds in the middle of the night a few apartments down. I immediately jerked awake, jumped down and hit the floor, screaming at my mother to get down, who had gotten up to look out the window to investigate.
I came home from Iraq a different person - no one I recognized. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, it was 2005. I had lost a co-worker not long before to suicide (also a symptom of PTSD, which we’ll explore in further newsletters) and that event hit me particularly hard, compounding the already-present compounded and complex violent trauma. I only realized I was more angry than I used to be, but that was it.
I realize now, though, that before I even deployed to Iraq, I suffered a major panic attack and a shame spiral, which led me to a very shadowed place. I weighed the pros and cons of life and decided to ask for help instead of pulling the trigger. I’ll never forget the Staff Sergeant who helped me that night.
After that, the rumors started. There were already rumors of me being a lesbian (I was in the military during President Clinton’s very militant and threatening Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy). The rumors of my needing mental health intervention was fuel for a fire of shame that was already hot with coals. I got the help and the medication I needed but for a long time, the cost felt...worthless.
I was sent to a mental hospital for two weeks, which further traumatized me instead of helping me and when I returned to duty, I was stripped of my duty weapon. This felt devastating. I was the Air Force version of “Military Police” and our entire job was to protect things from threats at all times until told otherwise, but all with a loaded firearm (sometimes two).
I was sent to work with the administrative staff for several weeks (pencil pushing, just like in the movies), which included performing guard duty at the main entry gate during the middle of a Colorado winter at 4am Monday through Friday and the embarrassment of not being able to do my real job - a job that I actually hated.
I eventually gained my weapon back, and it wasn’t a year after that I would be in southern Iraq at the height of the War on Terror in December, 2005.
After I returned home, with the pressure of my mental health struggles compressing my will to live, I avoided what I could. I skipped medical appointments, which later reflected so poorly I was demoted from a Senior Airman down to an Airman First Class. The sense of not enough afterwards was potent and omnipresent. I sobbed in front of my First Sergeant who had to sign some papers after the Major did. It was one of the worst nights of my life. Smoke bombs and no light to follow. Embarrassment abounded. I threw up steel-plated walls in the name of self-protection, (self-martyrdom) lit a batch of matches and then turned my back. I had gotten a DUI. I had somehow managed to escape full blown cocaine or meth or molly addiction and bar-turned-alley fights that would have ripped my life to tatters (I was doing a fine job of that all by myself). I had narrowly missed jail, probably. This is the power PTSD has.
Complex trauma tends to compound. If anxiety, nightmares, irritability, unwanted reminders continue to affect us, the trauma from the experience itself remains unresolved. It sits inside, huffing and puffing and waiting to explode or for the next terrible event to pile on top. That’s when and where the interventions (learned and practiced skills, which we’ll also explore in further newsletters) are truly needed, in the aftermath of a tragic, terrifying, or violent event instead of waiting for five other terrible things to pile on top of the shit pile that’s already there.
PTSD is exhausting.
Often, PTSD makes it difficult to discern between reality and un-navigated internal friction. The lines between social-appropriateness cross with the spiral tails of my brain’s constant inner dilemma of shit that doesn’t matter, i.e., say something about her boobs or keep my mouth shut? Or Did I do a threat check of that left corner? My central nervous system responds to everything like it’s a threat. Next week, we’ll take a look at “triggers” to shed some much needed perspective on how and why these kinds of possessive thoughts and behaviors manifest.
Herodotus illuminated mental trauma on the physical body and the mind. It’s taken many centuries for us to begin to investigate the evidence. I believe the Covid pandemic has provided the allowance for curiosity about the importance of mental health as a medical industry and elevate it to a space that feels less intrusive and more accessible. Collective society has grown to be more widely accepting of mental health disorders, and the shame once glued to the words mental health disorder has slowly begun to shed as we become more curious, and thereby, compassionate, about what it really means to suffer from PTSD.
What we’ve learned from history is people don’t learn from history.
-Warren Buffet
*1 Clifford Beers’s Legacy Lives On
*2 Books based on mental health disease - Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel
*3 Continuing research of mental health linked to physical health
I'm really appreciating your articles and how refreshing your raw honesty is. I've not experienced PTSD on this level, but I still think it's important for me to learn about. There are so many who need to find your publication.