McCain’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Presidential Reason For Concern?

An email chat lrose had with an associate in the psychology field in which he authorized her cut & paste:

re: McCain and his PTSD

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, Fourth Edition. Most of my personal opinions and working opinions are reflected from this resource. I know one of the committee members that helped write this definition.

 
And the committee, I have to say, brought together people who’d worked with traumatized people on many different social settings — combat veterans, accident victims, less from the sphere of sexual and domestic violence, but we were represented to some degree, and political violence. And what the consensus came out to be was that traumatic events were those that instilled a feeling of terror and helplessness. but experiences that instill helplessness and terror… which turns out to be different from fear.

 
Fear is something that we’re all biologically wired to experience when we’re in danger. We share this with other animals. When we perceive danger, we alert, we startle, we look around and figure out, do a quick appraisal of the situation, and we either fight or flee. That’s being revised now by some researchers looking more at women who say that “fight or flight” is a little bit more the male response. “Tend and befriend” — there’s a tendency to kind of huddle with one’s kind that you observe more in females. But, okay, fight or flight: there’s a whole biology of fear that’s involved.

 
Fight or flight doesn’t work in conditions of terror and helplessness. Under those conditions, it appears that some kind of biological rewiring seems to happen in people and in animals as well. So that even after the danger is over, the person continues to respond to reminders, to both specific reminders and to generally threatening situations as though this terrifying event were still occurring in the present. So you have the activation of the fear system, hyper-arousal. You have a kind of re-experiencing of the trauma that takes the form of flashbacks, nightmares, and so forth. And then you have this other more poorly understood part of the traumatic syndrome that has to do with a shutting down of responsiveness. Numbing, a sense that things aren’t real. There may be amnesia for some, more, or all of the event. A sense in the aftermath that one is just not really oneself. One is going through the motions. There’s a loss of connection of things that are or previously of interest.

 
And these are called the numbing or withdrawal or symptoms of PTSD. So hyper-arousal, re-experiencing, numbing is the triad. It’s a descriptive formulation. We understand a little bit about the psycho-biology, not a whole lot. And I think we’re coming to understand more and more that that’s the simple form. That is what happens to some people after a single impact trauma. If you repeat it, over and over, and especially if it begins early on and one’s development is formed in this environment, it gets a lot more complicated. I think it’s true of people in any situation of coercive control, whether you’re talking about a hostage situation that goes on for a long time, whether you’re talking about domestic violence or sexual child abuse … some religious cults have this same captivity kind of situation. And then, of course, the political situations of concentration camps or political prisoners.

 
Basically– In summarizing “The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness.” And then you go on to compare the political doublethink in an Orwell novel with what the psychologists and the psychiatrists call disassociation. So, you’re suggesting that this kind of repression, inability to confront both the individual reality and the larger reality, is something that happens to the individual and in some ways to the society.

 
It’s fascinating. If you talk to survivors of, especially the prolonged and repeated trauma, where the perpetrator, the captor, the torturer isn’t content to just have external compliance, but wants the captive to adopt and endorse his worldview, even after liberation you’ll get people saying, “I’m living in a double reality. I have the present and the past co-existing in my mind. It’s not clear which is more real to me. I have what’s left of my old value system, and my old way of seeing the world, and the perpetrator’s way of seeing the world co-existing in my mind. I can go back and forth between the two, and I’m not sure which I belong to or which belongs to me any longer.” So people have the experience of living in a double reality. And they describe … even the amnesia, people will describe simultaneously knowing and not knowing what happened. Remembering and not remembering what happened. When people get their memories back, they will often describe it as simultaneously re-living the experience and being outside of it as though it happened to somebody else. So, people learn to divide their consciousness under captivity, under conditions of coercive control. And since we don’t even understand unitary consciousness very well, when people have double consciousness, double reality, I’m in awe. I think it’s a fascinating window into how the mind works.

 
The simple formula for recovery and/or reclaiming lives back is: there are three elements. It’s providing them a zone of safety. Then they remember and tell their story. And then, very importantly, they have to reconnect.

 
I think that’s the take-home message that I try to give whenever I express my opinion, and whenever I aid in assisting others in their internal-to-external work…..is… I don’t think patients, survivors, victimized people can recover in isolation. They need other people and they need to take action in affiliation with others. I don’t think therapists can do therapeutic work alone. When we’re isolated with this, we do give in to despair. We do burn out. Or we lose our perspective. Ultimately if you’re talking about horrible abuses of power, you’re talking about the atrocious things that one person does to another person. And just when you think you’ve heard everything, and there’s simply nothing else that you could imagine that one person would intentionally do to another, somebody comes along with a story that just blows you away all over again. So, you’re dealing with very profound questions of human evil, human cruelty, human sadism. The abuse of power and authority. And the antidote to that is the solidarity of resistance. Nobody can do that alone. And, no one becomes whole, as in ones-full-self- prior; but left in a state of  ‘functioning-in-survivor-mode’ is not re-inventing a life to be led…. It is remaining a victim and victimizing others by way of making life choices while constantly numbing ones self.

 
Hence– if John McCain has been forced into the public arena since leaving Nam– and exercised only his continued survivor skills to seemingly live day by day– then he is not the man to have answer the red phone nor lead this country…. Why? Because he actually is not leading himself.