Then a Soldier

The next wave of the study of trauma came when the Second World War saw another influx of soldiers dealing with similar symptoms. Longitudinal studies showed that symptoms could persist anywhere from six to 20 years , if they disappeared at all. These studies returned some legitimacy to the concept of combat trauma that had been stripped away after the First World War. Vietnam was another watershed moment for combat-related PTSD because veterans began to advocate for themselves in an unprecedented way.

Beginning with a small march in New York in the summer of , veterans themselves began to become activists for their own mental health care.

Public understanding of war itself had begun to shift, too, as the widely televised accounts of the My Lai massacre brought the horror of war into American living rooms for the first time. This tendency to agnosticism about the physiology of PTSD is also reflected in contemporary evidence-based approaches to medicine. Modern medicine focuses on using clinical trials to demonstrate that a therapy works, but is skeptical about attempts to link treatment effectiveness to the biology underlying a disease.

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People can develop PTSD for a number of different reasons, not just in combat. Sexual assault, a traumatic loss, a terrible accident — each might lead to PTSD.

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Department of Veterans Affairs estimates about For comparison, a male veteran of those wars is four times more likely to develop PTSD than a man in the civilian population is. PTSD is probably at least partially at the root of an even more alarming statistic: Upwards of 22 veterans commit suicide every day. Therapies for PTSD today tend to be a mixed bag. Practically speaking, when veterans seek PTSD treatment in the VA system, policy requires they be offered either exposure or cognitive therapy. Exposure therapies are based on the idea that the fear response that gives rise to many of the traumatic symptoms can be dampened through repeated exposures to the traumatic event.

Cognitive therapies work on developing personal coping methods and slowly changing unhelpful or destructive thought patterns that are contributing to symptoms for example, the shame one might feel at not successfully completing a mission or saving a comrade. The most common treatment a veteran will likely receive will include psychopharmaceuticals — especially the class of drugs called SSRIs.

Mindfulness therapies, based on becoming aware of mental states, thoughts and feelings and accepting them rather than trying to fight them or push them away, are another option. There are also more alternative methods being studied such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing or EMDR therapy, therapies using controlled doses of MDMA Ecstasy , virtual reality-graded exposure therapy , hypnosis and creative therapies. The military funds a wealth of research on new technologies to address PTSD; these include neurotechnological innovations like transcranial stimulation and neural chips as well as novel drugs.

More than 70 years later, an unknown soldier comes home

In most of the nations who engaged in the conflict, the role played by the four million non-white non-Europeans who fought and laboured on the western front — and in other theatres of the war in Africa, the Middle East and Asia — has been airbrushed from popular memory. This was the first truly global war. Mechanised industrial weapons, such as the machine gun, combined with modern railways to become the enabling factors that led to a war of siege and slaughter on a continental scale. In seeking to break the deadlock of the trenches, all the main combatant nations, in their different ways, attempted to globalise the war.

The British deployed the men of their Indian army on the European battlefield from October ; the decision being made within days of the outbreak of hostilities. They later called upon men from Africa and the West Indies and fielded armies of labourers from across the empire and from technically neutral China. The French filled their trenches with troops from their own colonies; the famous Senegalese Tirailleurs infantry from French West Africa, Spahi cavalrymen from North Africa and units from Vietnam and Madagascar. Making common cause with the Ottoman Empire, Germany encouraged the Sultan to declare not just war but holy jihad against Britain, France and Russia.

With varying degrees of success, this edict was then used by German agents to induce the leaders of other Muslim peoples, in Libya, Afghanistan and Sudan, to take up arms against the British and French. When the victories stopped and the western front solidified in the last months of , the German response changed radically. In the German government issued a formal condemnation of the deployment of non-white combatants.

It was an appeal to white racial unity, one partially aimed at American public opinion. To help build its case, Germany also set about fabricating a series of atrocity stories; everything from supposedly barbarous Indian solders drinking the blood of slain Germans, to French West African troops carrying garlands of severed ears around their necks.

Some German soldiers, men whose only contact with Africans had been in the infamous human zoos of the early 20th century, believed the propaganda and were astonished, on being captured by Africans, that their lives were spared and their status as prisoners of war recognised. For Stoddard, and the millions in the US and Europe who thought like him, the armistice of was not the blessed end of 52 months of mechanised bloodletting, but potentially the beginning of a new age of reckoning.

I have met survivors who have shared their story with me and have explained the deep emotional pain they live through every day. Our job is to make sure that they, and the children born of rape, get the medical, psychosocial and other support that they need to help them rebuild their lives. Over the coming years, the UK will focus on ending the stigma suffered by survivors and support their reintegration into their families and communities.

At the same time, it is vital to stop the culture of impunity for these crimes. We need to ensure that the perpetrators are brought to account and that others know that sexual violence crimes will not go unpunished. You believe that using mass rape in wars destroys the whole of humanity and all moral boundaries.

It is a bloody path which often makes post-war reconciliation impossible. Can you explain why rape has become such a large obstacle in the task of building peace? Sexual violence destroys families and communities and leaves long lasting effects.

From shell-shock to PTSD, a century of invisible war trauma

We know that survivors can be ostracised from society, treated differently by family members, cut off from support networks and denied justice. This can have long-lasting effects on community reconciliation and stabilisation. Tackling sexual violence is central to conflict prevention and peace-building worldwide which is why we all need to be involved in ending sexual violence in conflict.

Survivors need to know that we, the international community, will do all we can to bring those responsible to account. They also need to know that we will support them as they reintegrate back into their families and communities. That we will help them get the support they need, whether that be medical, psychological, working to reintegrate into society or to help them with education and training.

Community and religious leaders can play a key role in this transition period by supporting survivors and educating communities to ensure survivors are not ostracised from their families and communities. Ultimately the shame of sexual violence lies with the perpetrators, not the survivors. As one of the principal protagonists of the UN Peacekeeping Defence Ministerial in London, she strongly denounced the phenomenon of violence and the sexual abuse committed by the Blue Helmets on mission.

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