PTSD Often Takes Years to be Manifested

As I have written in another post, “Roots of PTSD, Codependency and Addiction“, I was sober for 33 years before my PTSD emerged. I think I was lucky to have such a strong support system when I had the courage to face my fears.

1. In Coping With Life, Tom Davis writes about “Darren DeGraw, Manville and PTSD”:

“Darren, who had also lived in Barnegat, resigned on June 30, 2005 from the Manville force because of the PTSD he suffered from following a 1995 shooting, his ex-wife, Donna DeGraw, once told The Princeton Packet.”

“Even as he suffered, he apparently showed the same leadership spirit he had as a high school student, hoping to revive a community that had a wrecked economy and a population that suffered from a debilitating and deadly illness.”

“But there is only so much a person can do to save themselves, especially when they face the tragedy of depression and trauma that not only affects those around them. Mental illness is often a force bigger than ourselves. It was for my mother, who died of a heart attack in our Point Boro home, in 2003, after suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder for nearly 40 years.”

“For Darren, it was, apparently, a force that – despite the good life he led – was too big to conquer.”

“On Feb. 23, 1995, a man confronted Darren and another officer with a shotgun after a routine traffic stop, according to The Packet. The man stopped his vehicle, near Darren’s police car, and reportedly asked him, “Why are you following me?”

“The man then went back to his truck and took out a 12-gauge shotgun. The Packet reported that Darren and the other officer attempted to drive their police cars away from the man, but Darren’s car was shot at from 30 feet away, shattering his windshield.”

2.  From the New York Times, a tragedy that didn’t have to happen about a soldier, David Senft, who had had prior difficulties:

“A gentle snow fell on the funeral of Staff Sgt. David Senft at Arlington National Cemetery on Dec. 16, when his bitterly divided California family came together to say goodbye. His 5-year-old son received a flag from a grateful nation.”

“But his father, also named David Senft, an electrician from Grass Valley, Calif., who had worked in Afghanistan for a military contractor, is convinced that his son committed suicide, as are many of his friends and family members and the soldiers who served with him.”

“The evidence appears overwhelming. An investigator for the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, which has been looking into the death, has told Sergeant Senft’s father by e-mail that his son was found dead with a single bullet hole in his head, a stolen M-4 automatic weapon in his hands and his body slumped over in the S.U.V., which was parked outside the air base’s ammunition supply point. By his side was his cellphone, displaying a text message with no time or date stamp, saying only, “I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry.” (Mr. Senft shared the e-mails from the C.I.D. investigator with The New York Times.) “

“With Sergeant Senft, the warning signs were blaring.”

“The Army declared him fit for duty and ordered him to Afghanistan after he had twice attempted suicide at Fort Campbell, Ky., and after he had been sent to a mental institution near the base, the home of the 101st. After his arrival at Kandahar early in 2010 he was so troubled that the Army took away his weapon and forced him into counseling on the air base, according to the e-mails from the Army investigator. But he was assigned a roommate who was fully armed. C.I.D. investigators have identified the M-4 with which Sergeant Senft was killed as belonging to his roommate.”

“I question why, if he was suicidal and they had to take away his gun, why was he allowed to stay in Afghanistan?” asked Sergeant Senft’s father. “Why did they allow him to deploy in the first place, and why did they leave him there?”

3.  From Stop Walking on Eggshells: “High Conflict Relationships Can Led to Stress Disorder”:

Clinical psychologist Dr Joseph M Carver, PhD, who has a number of great articles on his website says in an online discussion that, “Every victim of abuse experiences some, if not multiple, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Carver writes:

[T]hese symptoms linger many years; some for a lifetime. Everyone knows this but it’s rarely bought up…During our period of abuse, the brain collects thousands of memories that contain details of our abusive experiences and the feelings (horror, terror, pain, etc.) made at that time. In what we call “traumatic recollection,” any similar experience in the future will recall the emotional memory of the abuse, forcing us to relive the event in detail and feeling.

Most people think of PTSD as happening only to people who have been in extreme circumstances, such as war veterans. However, in her book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1997) Judith Herman describes a subtype of PTSD she calls complex post traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD).

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