Stress disease in soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, was recently addressed in a two-part CBS television series called, ‘Mind Battles.’ . While well-intentioned, the program suffered from the two fallacies that usually occur in discussions on stress disease; 1) that it is a mental health issue and 2) that only a percentage of front-line workers have it.
Every single individual who works for any time in a front line occupation has this physical affliction that changes their physiological functioning, whether or not the usual symptoms are present (ie: anger, anxiety, depression, out of control emotions). The disease may not be overtly manifest in some individuals who serve as carriers. Only their families and close associates may suspect something is amiss.
In this respect, stress disease may be the predominant condition of our present century, a concern, not just for soldiers returning from battle, but for us all. The difference is one of degree and not of kind.
When the atom was split, it was discovered that a disruption of the smallest bit of the universe may have far-reaching consequences for humanity. This is true for the small adrenal gland that sits in the body on top of the kidneys. Hormones secreted by this gland, have three purposes in survival of the fittest; maintenance of the heart, stress control and the adrenaline reaction of flight or fight.
Researchers have discovered that when an individual is in a prolonged stress situation, the hormone that controls stress wears out. Then the adrenaline that causes fight or flight flows unhindered throughout the body. Those who have lived in fight situations can testify that adrenaline can take you very high. You can actually come to live for those highs, becoming an adrenaline junkie.
As a correctional officer, I did.
Any junkie who lives for the high knows the down is horrendous. CBS television reported in November, 2007, that almost 120 Iraq veterans a week commit suicide, (over 6000 a year, twice the national average). Before I left my job in prison and even after, I wanted to die.
But what about the mental? Baruch Spinoza said,”…most errors result solely from the incorrect applications of words to things.” “Mind,’ and its accompanist, ‘mental,’ is that kind of misapplication. There is a metaphysical carryover from Plato, incorporated into the Christian religion and instilled into Western Philosophy through Descartes, the separation of the body from thought.
Because of this separation, most of us think emotions are mental. The seventeenth century philosopher, Spinoza and the twenty-first century neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, have taught me otherwise. It is through these two writers that I am on the way to recovery from stress disease and the misleading label of Post Trauma Stress Disorder that was applied to me.
Like all other labels ascribed to stress disease, PTSD describes its symptoms, rather than its cause. It is like thinking of chicken pox as spots rather than an infection. Both Spinoza and Damasio deny that the mind is a separate entity from the body. Mind and body are two expressions of the same thing that have different functions in its unity.
Everything we think is conceived through the experiences we have in our body. These experiences occur because things in the universe force their existence upon our thinking, through our bodies. My thinking does not create things but rather things create my thinking.
We could get rid of the words, ‘mind’ and ‘mental,’ and use the word, ‘brain’ as the philosopher, Gilbert Ryle suggested, except that the two previous words convey a wealth of meaning that has been acquired through history. Substituting the word, ‘synapse’ does not carry the same weight.
Spinoza says it is the essence of human beings, in fact of everything that exists, to strive to preserve its own being. He calls this striving the ‘conatus.’ Damasio puts this word in a modern context: “What is Spinoza’s conatus in current biological terms? It is the aggregate of dispositions laid down in brain circuitry that, once engaged in internal or environmental conditions, seeks both survival and well-being.”
These dispositions, Damasio says, are ‘homeostatic regulations’ that range from ‘a nesting of the simple within the complex.’ He breaks them up into 5 groups.
On the bottom is metabolic regulation, basic reflexes and immune responses. Next comes pain and pleasure behaviors. Then drives and motivations. At the next level are what we think of as emotions, such as fear and anger. All four levels are body functions. It is only when all of these dispositions congregate into feelings does thinking enter the equation.
Damasio says emotions are not feelings. Emotions are from the body. Feelings are our thinking responses that try to make sense of what is happening in our body as it reacts to our environment. In modern society, this thinking response is often inadequate.
Emotions battle with our minds. Several days after a prisoner tried to kill me by sticking a shiv in my gut, a cement truck pulled out in front of me as I drove my small Japanese car. Immediately, with my wife screaming, I tried to run that huge vehicle off the road. My adrenalin had signaled, ‘fight’ and my thinking responded inadequately. Anger swept through my body, the emotion battling with my mind. As Spinoza says, reason will never win against a strong emotion. The only response that can win against a strong emotion is a stronger emotion.
Ultimately, it was this stronger emotion, love for my wife that won. I let the cement truck win, as he surely would have, anyway. My wife’s distress had penetrated my understanding, the place in our consciousness where strong emotion resides.
Our thinking or reason, Spinoza says, is only a staircase where we climb to what we know already exists: ‘the union which the mind has with the whole of nature.’ This is the knowledge which gives humans our strongest emotion; love for a truth which is greater than ourselves.
Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, understood this in his twelve step program: 1) ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable. 2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to understanding.’
These are the first two steps in recovery from alcoholism as they are for those who suffer from this adrenaline addiction of stress disease. We can call this higher power, God, nature or whatever, as long as we realize that there is a greater truth or reality than the prison of solipsism that locks up our age behind the barriers of misdirected emotions and inadequate thinking.
Having said this, let us return to our soldiers whom we send to fight. Stress disease begins when front line workers are trained in a ‘fight’ response. It is called ‘combat’ in the army and ‘security’ in corrections and police work.
You are trained to react, not to think, trained as a team member. Thinking and individualism can lead to the failure of the mission and the possible death of all concerned. How else could a perfectly intelligent and sane person be expected to advance and engage in a fire fight or walk down a prison range when prisoners are rioting, shouting and throwing fire bombs?
After training, the individual goes to work, only to find that 95% of their time is spent waiting for something to happen. Then something goes down and in the frenzied action, confusion and sheer excitement that follows, only his training and adrenaline carries him through the engagement. What a high!
If there are no causalities, the emotions remain high but if there are some after the conflict, adrenaline drops him down into the deep sadness that accompanies loss and the guilt and relief that a survivor experiences. The mind races over the incident, trying to make some sense of it, but it only spins its wheels on conflicting emotions.
The boring hours or days between the next engagement is like stagnant water full of mosquito larva. The mind spins and breeds inadequate thinking. The person turns to comradeship, war stories and humor, (usually black), for solace. The shared experiences of team members in dangerous jobs are seldom like those anywhere else in society. A special bond occurs.
In the days that follow between adrenalin highs of engagement and adrenaline downs of boredom, the body changes and the adrenal gland no longer controls stress but only lives for the highs and suffers the downs. You are an adrenaline junkie.
Somehow you survive and leave the theatre of engagement for the world. But you no longer fit there. Your fight skills are no longer needed. They begin to express themselves in inappropriate contexts. The world no longer seems exciting. Even things that once excited you have lost their gloss. Your loved ones do not understand you and you drift apart from your remaining comrades.
Your mind has lost the battle with the emotions. You lose the main drive of existence, to survive. This is the worse case scenario but every frontline survivor takes their wounds back into the world and limps along with them. If you are fortunate enough to receive counseling, when you come back to the world, you are told that your thinking is wrong. This is something you already know.
If your counselor is as practical as an A.A. counselor, you may get some help in learning what triggers your emotions and how to avoid them. The best help found for front-line troops has been, like for alcoholics, support groups of other adrenaline junkies who have been there.
However, much of what passes for counseling is only mind games played by advocates who believe in mind battles. The adrenaline junkie gets excuses but little support for recovery. Neuroscience has discovered, (as did Spinoza centuries ago), the connection between the emotions and the body.
Some fields in psychology are also leaning in this direction but not until we get rid of the idea of ‘Mind Battles,’ the psychoanalytic deluge will still mislead damaged individuals whether they suffer the stress in war or even at the office.