Me the drama queen

[Sue U]

Thank you all. Back from the hosp., .

Glad you slipped the hand of Azrael. This time, at least. Wishing you a speedy recovery.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Thanks for the image Joe. At least that was removed, day after. Obviously, my P had Totally Stopped Draining

The rhythm of life - hacking at matata. toilet chair drink water toilet chair drink water toilet chair drink water toilet chair drink water et sic porro



(lib, if you really want to have a go at it, start a thread)

[liberty]

Thanks for the image Joe. At least that was removed, day after. Obviously, my P had Totally Stopped Draining

The rhythm of life - hacking at matata. toilet chair drink water toilet chair drink water toilet chair drink water toilet chair drink water et sic porro



(lib, if you really want to have a go at it, start a thread)

I know it’s none of my business, so you don’t have to answer, but I’m curious whether you have a kidney problem?

[MajGenl.Meade]

BPH requiring HoLEP lib. An amazingly fitting acronym really

[liberty]

PTSD is a wandering term. Once upon a time Trauma was a technical term for an event that could be expected to directly result in death. Now it seems to apply to paper cuts, Now the military is using a term 'Moral wounds' Just one more datum in the long road of human behavior. Authority recognizes a big problem and names it. Understanding comes to see fixing the problem is too hard, too expensive, too embarrassing, so change the name. Nobody suffers from shelf shock anymore,

snailgate.

Normally I consider your contributions to be of the highest quality, but this one doesn’t pass the smell test.

No, nobody is calling a paper cut trauma except in the clinical sense that any abrasion to skin is a trauma to the epidermis.

PTSD is reserved for the greatest of insults to the human brain - whether the insults suffered in war by military members, or the insults suffered by children who are grievously abused in the developmental stages, or by adults who endure a pattern of abuse or individual incidents of abuse that create the damage to their brains that gives rise to the pattern of reactivity and suffering that is now labeled post traumatic stress disorder.

The article I linked from the Civil War studies journal went into great detail describing the various manifestations seen in the soldiers of that time, and it is instructive how similar these were to what is seen manifest in active duty and veterans of warfare today.

It’s been a long hard battle engaged in by PTSD sufferers and their advocates to raise awareness and support of the issue, so you’ll have to forgive my sensitivity when met with what seems to be the kind of dismissiveness that has made it so difficult for so many years to gain respect for the condition and the many people who suffer from it.

I don’t want to leave this thread without acknowledging something I believe is true. Stress can be dangerous. A certain amount can toughen a person and make them stronger, but too much can overwhelm someone. I can’t scientifically prove it, but I believe it’s real. I believe stress can eat away at a person until their health fails or their feeling of hopelessness leads to suicide. I don’t know what can be done about it, because there’s no way to predict how much stress any one person can take. All I can say is that if someone feels a situation is damaging their health, they should try to get out of that situation or find a way to change it.

[Big RR]

All I can say is that if someone feels a situation is damaging their health, they should try to get out of that situation or find a way to change it.

Perhaps, but few can do that; indeed, the worse stress arises when you do not have the choice to either remove oneself or change a situation, so it builds and exerts its damage on the person, continuing even if the person is able to make the changes you prescribe.

[ex-khobar Andy]

Stress can be dangerous.

Well I'm glad we've cleaned that up.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Revisiting . . . I found that of which the PTSD comments brought to mind. . .

[Burning Petard]

Thank you General. Personal curiosity. Decimate. Once upon a time that was an objective, measurable, military objective of military commanders. Render one tenth of the enemy unit incapable of resistance, and the entire unit would collapse. But equipment, training (both physical and mental) got better and 1/10th was no longer enough. Now decimate is still used, but if it has any numerical meaning, perhaps it implies less than a tenth still resisting.

War-sociologists like to refer to the American Civil War as the first modern war because Artillery was so important in that conflict. No longer did it make sense to instruct the troops 'Don't fire 'til you see the whites of their eyes.' Shells were fired to impact on the other side of the hill where the gunners could not even see where the shells were impacting. That developed into the most horrible thing an infantry man can experience. (my opinion, but things have probably changed to be even worse.) It is called 'time on target'. Guns, rockets, are all aimed at one particular spot on the map. They are fired from many places, many distances, many different kinds of shells. All timed to land at the same spot on the map at the same time. For one who is on or near that spot, the time stretched to eternity.

That IS shell shock.

But for the era of your active campaigns Gen'l, and the time of remembrance that came immediately after, what was the term for individuals who carried those interior wounds that continued to psychically bleed?

snailgate.

[BoSoxGal]

[MajGenl.Meade]

Snail

Mid-nineteenth-century America lacked the scientific understanding that a traumatic experience, like warfare, could harm the mind, meaning they had no words to identify PTSD or shell shock, as medical caregivers in later wars did. Nor could they comprehend that a symptom – like startle response to a loud noise, a reflexive action of fright conditioned by the sounds of battle – was triggered by combat.

Above comes from a worthy article on the National Museum of Civil War Medicine website

https://www.civilwarmed.org/ptsd/

Regrettably, it is likely that battlefield breakdowns were often classified as "cowardice' whereas the development of post-war maladies (in the absence of conflict) were not so easily brushed off, though still not understood as anything more complex than "loss of mind" or craziness.

[BoSoxGal]

Again:

Dying to Get Home: PTSD in the Civil War

[liberty]

When I was a little boy, my stepfather often talked about the Civil War veterans he had known in Mississippi when he was a child. He described them as hard men, men who rarely smiled and were tough, quick to anger, and capable of sudden violence. He said they could kill a man in a heartbeat and think nothing of killing the family pet over the slightest irritation.

Of course, it is entirely possible that not all of them were like that. More likely, the harshest ones simply made the strongest impression on his young mind, while the milder and gentler veterans faded into the background and were less memorable to him. He carried some of that same hardness himself. My mother once told me that when I was a baby, he killed a puppy after it scratched me, striking it with the back of his first so hard that it flew out the door into the yard and died instantly.