Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

What Does It Take for Traumatized Kids to Thrive?

May 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Paine High School was a shambles when Jim Sporleder arrived to serve as its new principal in the spring of 2007. Housed in a run-down, brown-brick building with metal security screens on its windows, the “alternative” secondary school served 77 of Walla Walla, Washington’s most challenging students. And for years, by nearly all accounts, it had served them exceedingly poorly. About half of Paine’s students had been ordered to attend the school by a judge; most of the rest had been ejected by the city’s mainstream high school due to behavioral problems. Students weren’t the only ... Read More

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Actors: Emotionally Aware, Yet Particularly Vulnerable

July 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

What sort of person is driven to become an actor? It’s a career that demands extraordinary emotional openness, but inevitably involves a steady stream of rejections—interspersed, for the lucky few, with the occasional short-lived success. Does this instability make actors more vulnerable to emotional problems, as so many high-profile Hollywood breakdowns would suggest? Or does the process of portraying other people—which often involves reliving tragic events onstage, night after night—help thespians come to terms with their own traumas? Paula Thomson and S. Victoria Jaque of ... Read More

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A Legacy of 9/11: Years of Increased Illness

September 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

To most Americans, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were shocking, frightening, enraging. Newly published research suggests they were also, quite literally, sickening. Two University of California, Irvine, researchers report the tragedy triggered a large and lingering rise in self-reported health problems, as well as visits to medical professionals, across the nation. Among a nationally representative sample of about 2,000 American adults, reports of physical ailments increased 18 percent over the three years following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. This story originally posted on July ... Read More

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PTSD Therapy: Restoring Honor to the Enemy

August 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

One side of post-traumatic stress that not many people talk about — maybe because it's so hard to separate from waging a modern war — is the way a nation and its military tend to dehumanize the opposing side. Erich Maria Remarque's novel about World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front, took dehumanization as its theme, and it still has a lot to say about war trauma even if Americans have cornered the market on clinical descriptions of PTSD. All Quiet follows a young, German soldier named Paul Bäumer through the trenches of the war in France. He's a tough-skinned narrator with no ... Read More

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Vets With PTSD Awarded Higher Disability Benefits

July 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The Associated Press reports today that "more than a thousand Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder would be given lifetime disability retirement benefits such as military health insurance under the terms of a settlement reached between the government and the veterans." The veterans had filed a class-action lawsuit in response to the slow pace of the U.S. military's review of their cases, in which they argued that their disability benefits were lower than that to which they were legally entitled. Michael Scott Moore has reported on PTSD extensively for ... Read More

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A Brief History of Combat Trauma

July 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

One side effect of NATO's 10-year war in Afghanistan is a steady rise in post-traumatic stress in Western Europe — especially Germany and Britain — for the first time since World War II. The statistics are small compared to America's, but German experts were startled by a spike in the number of registered PTSD victims in the Bundeswehr, or German military. The Germans unexpectedly found themselves not in a peaceful reconstruction project but in a war. Car bombings and other attacks against German troops flared in provinces like Kunduz between 2006 and 2009, and the number of PTSD cases ... Read More

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PTSD’s Trauma Symptoms Ring Out Through Ages

June 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The irony of post-traumatic stress disorder is that it sounds modern — the term is so clinically bureaucratic some people think it may be the invention of some American psychological board. But the symptoms have been around for hundreds or thousands of years, or perhaps as long as there have been people. The symptoms were called "nostalgia" in the Civil War, "shell shock" in World War I, and Jonathan Shay, author of Achilles in Vietnam, has pointed out that The Iliad may be the first work of literature based on combat stress. But Samuel Pepys may be the earliest historical figure ... Read More

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PTSD Affecting More U.S. Soldiers Than British

June 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Combat stress is still a murky and sometimes taboo element of soldiering, but one of the strangest discoveries is that the strain isn't evenly spread among vets from different countries. For example: A far higher percentage of American soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq and Afghanistan than British soldiers do. Americans involved in those wars have suffered from PTSD at a rate of 30 percent, compared to 4 percent among Brits, according to a study published by the U.K.'s Royal Society of Medicine. And researchers say the difference isn't a reflection of ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Health, July-August 2011
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Virginia Tech Study Contains Lessons for Fort Hood

November 12, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Psychological trauma among Virginia Tech students in the wake of the 2007 mass shooting was widespread and long-lasting, according to newly published research that suggests such tragedies are communal events with far-reaching ramifications. The research provides insights that could be helpful to members of the Ford Hood community suffering post-traumatic symptoms in the wake of last week's mass killing at the Texas military base, as well as to counselors working with that traumatized population. Writing in the journals Violence and Victims and Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, ... Read More

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