When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home
How All of Us Can Help Veterans
-
- 40,99 €
-
- 40,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Traumatized veterans are often diagnosed as suffering from a psychiatric disorder and prescribed a regimen of psychotherapy and psychiatric drugs. But why, asks psychologist Paula J. Caplan in this impassioned book, is it a mental illness to be devastated by war or other intolerable experiences such as military sexual assault? What is a mentally healthy response to death, destruction, and moral horror? In When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home, Caplan argues that the standard treatment of therapy and drugs is often actually harmful. It adds to veterans' burdens by making them believe wrongly that they should have "gotten over it"; it isolates them behind the closed doors of the therapist's office; and it makes them rely on often harmful drugs. The numbers of traumatized veterans from past and present wars who continue to suffer demonstrate the ineffectiveness of this approach.
Sending anguished veterans off to talk to therapists, writes Caplan, conveys the message that the rest of us don't want to listen—or that we don't feel qualified to listen. As a result, the truth about war is kept under wraps. Most of us remain ignorant about what war is really like—and continue to allow our governments to go to war without much protest. Caplan proposes an alternative: that we welcome veterans back into our communities and listen to their stories, one-on-one. (She provides guidelines for conducting these conversations.) This would begin a long overdue national discussion about the realities of war, and it would start the healing process for our returning veterans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's a grim irony: too many American soldiers return from duty and fall into homelessness, addiction, and thoughts of suicide, yet their crazy behavior might just be the sanest response possible to the horrors of war. What's really crazy, says Harvard psychologist Caplan, is the belief that only a psychologist or psychiatrist can help these suffering souls. Caplan (The Myth of Women's Masochism) delivers a compelling argument that society has "psychiatrized" these vets' normal response to the horrors of war, with the result that many are not receiving effective care. Caplan depicts a military bureaucracy that sweeps vets into the overarching category of the mentally ill; she cites the case of one war-weary vet who became "more depressed about dealing with the than anything that happened in Iraq." Helping, Caplan says, is as simple and as difficult as not turning away when vets speak of their experiences, but rather listening attentively and nonjudgmentally. Some readers may be impatient with Caplan's attacks on a "psychiatrized" society or her belief that listening to veterans will somehow bring an end to war, but she makes an important and welcome call for average citizens to take responsibility for our veterans.
