The 51st State in the Union: PTSD

Murder, madness, mayhem. Incest, child abuse, spouse abuse. Treason, perjury, malfeasance.

Americans are consuming an increasing diet of emotional toxic waste, which grows more poisonous with each new technological advance in communications. If the psychological damage on American citizens gets any worse, we'll have to add Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome as the 51st State in the Union.

More than ever, we are exposed to violence on a never before seen scale. Because of this overwhelming exposure to violence and mayhem, Americans are becoming twitchier than ever before. The result of this exposure to family violence, neighborhood violence, school and workplace violence, and now, the violence of war, is generating an increasing cycle of trauma, drug use, alcohol use, escapism, and, yes, more violence.

A mile across town, in the heart of the ‘Hood, an out of control crack head throws a tantrum in front of her teenaged relatives, and conducts a three way conversation with the imaginary people who live inside her head. She airs a litany of complaints, and blames her addiction and out of control lifestyle on everything from a purported rape attack in childhood by one her mother’s boyfriends, to a recent out of town pistol- whipping.

No one, but no one, she claims, can understand what she has gone through. Her situation is unique and her selfish family isn’t giving her proper attention. To punish them, she punishes herself. Or threatens to.

For years, she made allegations that one of her mother’s boyfriends raped her when she was a child. Her mother slid from the addiction of nightclubs, to the addiction of “the church”, with the ease of a seasoned emotional escape artist. A love affair with the powerful dynamics of the herd mentality in the nightclub soon transformed itself into a toxic addiction to "church".

After being left alone and ignored as small children now the addict and her brothers and sisters suffered the consequences of being the offspring of the ‘barfly cum church fly’, leaving her children to fend for themselves as children, and live with the consequences of her emotional abandonment as adults.

Some became sexually promiscuous. Others acted out, turned to both sex and drugs as escapes. And one, turned to promiscuity, drug use, theft, prostitution, emotional blackmail and attempted suicide.

For more than 20 years she has slid in and out of sobriety and dependency, building a nest of chaos and confusion in her wake. In many ways, her claim of rape is validated by her behavior. She’s almost a pattern card for post-rape Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD).

Psychiatric authorities point to a number of causes and consequences of PTSD, including rape, sexual and physical abuse, repeated trauma, lack of social and parental support, fires and being in a war zone. Consequences include disassociation, acting out, substance abuse, eating disorders and promiscuity. (Roy Lubit, MD, PhD, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Children). Lubit says another consequence of PTSD “is the multiple emotional and behavioral problems that can arise…substance abuse, aggression, eating disorders, sexual acting out…”

For children, the anxiety associated with PTSD often keeps them unable to adequately deal with normal childhood experiences such as school. Some authorities believe that PTSD symptom may often be confused with various types of attention deficit disorders. Hence, many children who are doped up on drugs for hyperactivity may be suffering from PTSD.

As is probably the case of the out of control crack head, whose relatives have gotten so many late night suicide prevention calls from the police that they no longer answer her calls. Relatives are raising her children as best as they can, trying to fend off her dangerous attempts at “motherhood” and “aunthood”, both ineffective attempts may be causing additional PTSD problems with her children, nieces and nephews.

Unable to sustain employment, other than selling sex on the street, she has stolen from family and friends, and isn’t shy about lifting the occasional item from a drug store or grocery, if she thinks she can get away with it. Degradation is in her bones, and she wears her madness like an unwashed second skin.

She courts death like a child playing with a favorite toy, intimately and with abandon. The only thing that annoys the snot out of her is that her family no longer wants to play the game. She lost her “control” over her relatives and long-gone friends a long time ago.

They simply got tired of being at the mercy of an emotional vampire, whose out of control street stories and tales of being gang raped, robbed and beaten brought the filth of the streets into their living rooms. The sympathy button has been turned off and her relatives have long since tired of the aborted attempts at detox, and the twitchy, out of control behavior, which takes far too much energy to deal with. They have their own lives and their own children—and they’ll kick her to the curb in a hot minute if it means protecting the children.

Her presence, her conversation, everything to do with her is toxic and is capable of contaminating others in its wake. Her family protects itself as much as possible but the entire situation is a prime example of the delayed effect of childhood sexual abuse.

A medical journal notes that “Studies of adults who were sexually or physically abused as children demonstrate significantly higher rates of emotional problems (72-100%)” than they do as children, leaving many to conclude that childhood abuse may present problems more in later life than in childhood. In short, the adult madness that the crack addict is displaying has exploded more in adulthood than in childhood.

Like this family, too many of today’s children and their care givers are caught up in a maelstrom of malicious events over which neither they have control. Farm children see their parents, grandparents and relatives hauled off their farms in chains. The children of crime suspects are given over to over-burdened Child Welfare Authorities, and are often abused more in the foster home than the “abusive” home from which they were taken. Little old ladies die of heart attacks when drug agents kick in the wrong apartment door—theirs. Children huddle against one another in classrooms, as another out of control child with an assault rifle mows down their fellow students and teaches. And, dangerously estranged boyfriends and husbands gun women down in their workplaces or right on the courthouse lawn.

We can run, but we cannot hide. The 24-hour news cycle won’t let us. Usually, there is enough madness in the US to keep the channels spewing fear and madness, but if the crazies in America go on vacation, there’s always the war to fall back on.

The old saying is still true. Violence begets violence. And madness, too. So, if your neurotic, alcoholic, crack head or meth freak relative is getting on your nerves, just turn on the television, or head to the computer and wallow in somebody else’s misery. It’s all there. And, best of all: it belongs to somebody else.