Needle to the Neck

War’s tragedy doesn’t end with the war, nor does trauma end when the precipitating cause goes away. When my father’s generation came home from the Second World War, a lot of them brought the war home with them. The traditional cure for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in those days was lots of alcohol, followed by kicking the wife and kids around the house.

Not that this happened to me. My father was singularly untraumatized by his war experience, or he got over it very quickly. But a lot of my peers weren’t so lucky. And a lot more of my peers found themselves in Vietnam and came back as human wreckage.

So again we have hundreds of thousands of soldiers facing danger overseas, and a vast increase in PTSD cases that threatens to overwhelm our mental health infrastructure. The Pentagon is alert to the danger— even if individual officers and NCOs are not— and have been testing a variety of therapies, including “bioenergy,” reiki, “dog therapy,” yoga, and meditation.

And now it looks as if they just might have found an answer, something called a “stellate ganglion block,” which involves injecting a small amount of local anaesthetic into a complex of nerves located in the neck. The sample so far treated is very small, but the success rate is through the roof.

Since PTSD is caused by a brain so traumatized by repeated jolts of adrenaline that it can’t believe it’s out of danger, it makes sense to tranquilize that part of the brain that keeps reliving the trauma. It looks as if they might have found the right place.

Let’s cross our fingers that this therapy. The social consequence of a war is always increased misery at home, and any misery averted is, well, misery averted.

(Incidentally, has anyone seen Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place? An absolutely brilliant performance as a Pacific vet with PTSD— got the symptoms exactly right, even if the disease hadn’t been described yet.)