The Battlefield Brought Home

Our war veterans are not the only ones feeling the effects of PTSD years after returning home. Their spouses, children, and loved ones can all fall victim to PTSD. A parent who returns from war with PTSD exposes their family to symptoms like flashbacks and outbursts. The victim can be very quiet and negative, and suffer from hyper arousal and hyperawareness. These symptoms wreak havoc on a family, and not just in a social way. Secondary PTSD is a condition that is being ignored by doctors and the government, and deserves more attention and resources to help families plagued by this terrible sickness.

PTSD is contagious, and is as easily transmittable as the common cold. The new condition that’s created when family members begin having symptoms similar to PTSD is called Secondary PTSD. Victims catch it from prolonged close contact with someone who has PTSD, and the longer the contact, the more likely they’ll catch it. Living with someone who is constantly on edge, having outbursts, or is violent, has lasting impressions on a human brain. As a result of that contact, those impressions begin to change the victim’s behavior to react to what they’re exposed to. This causes family members to suffer from a new trauma that is their own. They become quiet, suffer from hyper arousal or hyper sensitivity, become angry, and suffer from many other symptoms that are similar to PTSD. We’re influenced by our close surroundings, and for the victims of Secondary PTSD, their surroundings are dangerous, frightening, and contagious.

Secondary Traumatization of Wives of War Veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, a study published in a Croatian Medical journal, defines Secondary PTSD as “the stress caused by providing help, or wishing to help, and offering emotional support to a traumatized person.” It’s hard for close family members to avoid Secondary PTSD. They want to help the returning veteran, yet they put themselves at risk as well. The stress from living with, or trying to help, someone who may have sudden outbursts or lash out at us puts our emotions and minds into a whirlwind that tears us down. The close contact that is required to offer emotional support puts stress on a person’s mind and emotions, opening up the gates for Secondary PTSD to start forming.

But the father’s symptoms aren’t transmitting to his family directly. Symptoms are internal, something we can’t see. It is the way the father acts because of the symptoms, the manifestations, that is the transmitter. The family can see him break down in tears for no apparent reason. They can see him suddenly snap in anger and frustration at the slightest thing. They see the shell of a man they once knew to be strong and who never cried. The manifestations shock and stun a family, traumatizing them. The symptom of anxiety isn’t being directly transmitted to the wife. The way the father acts because of the anxiety, like yelling or being overly emotional, is what causes the wife trauma.

A vet at home flinches every time the toaster pops, and cowers when a loud motorcycle passes the house. The home becomes a battlefield for the family because the father acts like it is one. For example, because of the constant exposure to explosions and gunfire from his two tours in Iraq, sudden loud, sharp noises scare Dad, and are a trigger for his flashbacks. His son accidently drops a cup onto a tile floor, creating a sharp, shattering sound which triggers one of Dad’s flashbacks. Dad immediately freaks out, reacting as if the noise came from a bullet hitting the side of his Humvee. His reaction unfolds in front of his son who cowers in fear and is upset because he hurt his dad. To Dad, his son is the enemy in the middle of an ambush because he created the loud noise, so he may even unintentionally yell at his son because the sudden noise has startled him and makes him feel as if a threat is incoming. The son is now scared, confused, and worried. After the flashback passes, Dad tries to console his son and apologize, but the damage has already been done. The Dad’s unpredictability, and the new connection between creating a loud noise and getting hurt, makes Dad an enemy to the son.

When overseas, Dad was also very rough with his buddies and the prisoners of war. When he is home, he sometimes treats his wife and children the same way because he forgets they aren’t his war buddies or criminals. During arguments he gets rough with his wife, and sometimes wrestling with the kids goes a bit too far. He doesn’t mean to, sometimes he doesn’t even realize what’s happening, but the shift from living a life with soldiers and criminals to a life with a wife and children is too much to quickly adjust to. He is unintentionally hurting his family because he sometimes forgets the difference or thinks he’s still at war.

These scenarios aren’t just made up stories that may happen. They are real, and are happening in many PTSD families. A revealing Mother Jones article, Is PTSD Contagious?by Mac McClelland shows us what life with a victim of PTSD is like. Caleb Vines suffers from PTSD, and his symptoms are spreading to his family. His wife Brannan has never been to war yet suffers from the same symptoms as he does. Six-year-old daughter Katie overreacts at things, yells, and anxiously picks at sores on her legs. Caleb isn’t intentionally making his wife and daughter this way. He can’t help it. His wife and daughter are constantly exposed to his symptoms. Katie gets her yelling from her father’s outburst and nightmares, and Brannan gets her hyper arousal and hyper vigilance from Caleb constantly being on edge, creating a tense atmosphere in the house. The Vines family is only one of thousands of families suffering from this effect of action and reaction.

Impressionable children are easily traumatized by a parent’s flashback at the dining room table. When a parent has a flashback, the house becomes like a battle zone for the child, and the parent like a fellow soldier who is in need. Dad is having a flashback in front of his son again. The son immediately jumps into action and tries to calm Dad down because if Mom learns that Dad is having another flashback she’ll have a worry fit. The son can barely handle one frantic parent, let alone two, so he has to fight through his fear and confusion to try and console Dad. It is this kind of situation that causes trauma in a child.

According to Family of a Vet, young children will fear flashbacks because they cannot understand what is happening to their parent. Older children may become defensive, and think they need to protect the PTSD victim. In both younger and older children, flashbacks can be a confusing thing that causes anger at the unknown and not being able to help, and confusion because they don’t understand why it is happening.

PTSD victims can also be very quiet and withdrawn. To a child, this can be seen as that parent not wanting or loving them anymore. This causes confusion, guilt, anxiety and frustration because the child doesn’t understand what is wrong with the parent or what he or she is doing wrong to make the parent pull away from them. Emotional stresses such as anxiety, grouchiness, and feeling constantly on edge affect children in waves. Teens become confused and angry, and will run away or avoid their parents to separate themselves from the source of these confusing emotions. A spouse may feel alienated because of the way the husband or wife treats them. They may begin to worry that the family will never be normal again, and devote much of their time and life trying to help their loved one, neglecting themselves and the other members of the family.

Many people may be skeptical that there is nothing being done to help the victims of this horrible condition, but Secondary PTSD has only recently been getting a lot more attention, so there is actually not much being done to help the sufferers. Family of a Vet and the article, Secondary Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) both state that Secondary PTSD is not recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). There are counselors who victims can go to for aid, but they are expensive and are private companies that aren’t dedicated to PTSD and Secondary PTSD. In order to help others in her situation, and to get help herself, Brannan Vines from the previously mentionedMother Jones article has turned to blogging and Facebook because there is little to no official support for Secondary PTSD.

Brannan and her family have been dealing with Secondary PTSD for several years since her husband returned from overseas. It didn’t take long for Brannan to realize that she and her daughter were being affected by her husband’s PTSD, and with no success in trying to find aid for her condition, she turned to Facebook and blogging, hoping to get the word out about Secondary PTSD. Hopefully, through enough people coming forward and saying something about Secondary PTSD, Brannan and the other victims will be able to really get recognized and receive aid to help them.

Brannan’s family and other families affected by Secondary PTSD are like the families affected by PTSD before it was officially recognized as a medical condition. American Psychiatric Association added PTSD to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, even though people had been suffering from PTSD long before that. Just a year before that, PTSD was an unknown condition that many people thought was made up or an overreaction to something. The diagnostic criteria for PTSD were revised in the later, newer editions of the DSM in 1987, 1994, 2000, and most recently, 2013. How PTSD was described went through at least five different versions before today, and even now it is still changing. Right now, Secondary PTSD is just like PTSD was in its early stages of people understanding what it was. When PTSD was first discovered, not many people knew what caused it or even exactly what it was. That delay in understanding and failure to provide treatment ruined war veterans’ and their families’ lives. Secondary PTSD has been around just as long as PTSD, yet there is still no official recognition or treatment for it. People don’t believe it’s real, that it is a growing problem that is staring us in the face waiting to be recognized. The reluctance to act on what we know, and believe that it is a real issue, is costing many people much needed help. Like PTSD, Secondary PTSD will be recognized one day, and that day can be sooner than PTSD if we all start paying attention to it.

PTSD affects everyone in a family. The actions and behaviors of a PTSD victim due to his or her symptoms create a hostile environment in the household, putting spouses under stress and uneasiness and children in confusion and fear. We don’t have to go to war or witness a traumatic event to get PTSD. All we have to do is be constantly exposed to the symptoms and behavior of a PTSD victim; the repetitious traumatic stress from the victim is enough to give us our own PTSD-like disorders. Secondary PTSD isn’t a spouse’s crying at her husband’s differences from returning home from war. It’s a mental reaction to a PTSD victim’s symptoms, a reaction that creates a new trauma and symptoms in spouses and children that are very much like PTSD. We all may have our own ways of describing Secondary PTSD or explaining how one “catches” it, but that doesn’t matter. Secondary PTSD is a psychological disorder that deserves more attention and a clear, true description.

Works Cited

Bass, Victoria. “Secondary Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).” Examiner.com. N.p., 28 Jan. 2013. Web. 08 Apr. 2014.

Frančišković, Tanja. “Secondary Traumatization of Wives of War Veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” Croatian Medical Journal, 28 Mar. 2007. Web. 7 Mar. 2014.

Friedman, Matthew J., MD, PhD. “PTSD: National Center for PTSD.” PTSD History and Overview –. U.S Department of Veteran Affairs, 25 Mar. 2014. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

McClelland, Mac. “Is PTSD Contagious?” Mother Jones. Mother Jones, Jan.-Feb. 2013. Web. 08 Apr. 2014.

“PTSD: National Center for PTSD.” Effects of PTSD on Family –. PTSD: National Center for PTSD, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2014.

“Secondary PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).” Secondary PTSD. Family of a Vet, n.d. Web. 08 Apr. 2014.

“Secondary PTSD in Children.” Secondary PTSD (STS) in Children. Family of a Vet, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2014