Photo credit: U.S. Army, Flickr
A psychiatrist talks about the different elements of adjusting back to civilian life, and briefly raises the importance of unresolved adverse childhood experiences.
Maybe it is a cliche to say that someone who has gone off to war will return home “changed,” but it should not be a surprise.
The adjustment back to life in the United States may be smoother for some and more difficult for others, like the soldiers that psychiatrist Marvin Oleshansky, M.D., sees at the U.S. Army’s Tripler Medical Center in Honolulu.
“The stress of grief can precipitate the onset or exacerbation of existing emotional or physical problems, including those unmourned losses” among soldiers returning from war, said Marvin Oleshansky, M.D., until recently a psychiatrist at Tripler Medical Center in Honolulu. “I call that change ‘postdeployment stress disorder,’ ” he said. “They have sleep problems, road rage, family issues, drink a lot, and it’s not unusual for things to escalate to a dangerous level.”
Grief and mourning are often overlooked as keys to diagnosis and treatment. Loss of one’s friends and the resultant grief may be inevitable in war, but onset of PTSD symptoms may be delayed until something else triggers memories of previous losses, he pointed out. “Soldiers don’t understand why it starts later and not right away.”
Any unresolved adverse childhood experiences may also be recalled by the stressors of the military experience and contribute to the distress that brings soldiers to treatment, he added. “If there’s one predictive factor, that would be it.”
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