Fearless Journalism: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD

http://www.good.is/post/how-violent-sex-helped-ease-my-ptsd/Journalist Mac McClelland covers the human rights beat for Mother Jones magazine, and the experiences of her profession led to her developing PTSD. Here's her account, for Good magazine, about how it affected her. It's fearless journalism, and not easy to read, but well worth your time:

How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD

This Fearless Life - Father’s Day: The Child of An Untreated PTSD Sufferer Speaks

A must-read essay from the founder of Fearless Nation PTSD Support:

This Fearless Life: Father’s Day: The Child of An Untreated PTSD Sufferer Speaks

Fishing: A Welcome Escape from PTSD

Fishing can offer a quiet, relaxed, comfortable way to get out in nature (and maybe back into some of your old routines) without encountering crowds of people, Michigan's Midland Daily News reports (scroll down the sidebar).

PTSD or PTS?

Our sister site Fearless Nation PTSD Support calls PTSD a normal reaction to abnormal events. The military agrees and is pushing to have PTSD reclassified as simply PTS -- post-traumatic stress, no "disorder." In fact, more often than not, they are already dropping the D.

Time's Battleland blog looks into the issue:

Military mental-health workers constantly try to reduce the stigma associated with mental-health ills, and one way to do that is to not term the problem a disorder.


Some veterans agree, but others -- fearful the name change is simply a way of minimizing what they're going through -- don't. "It's a double-edged sword," a long-time Army psychiatrist says privately. "We're trying to reduce the stigma associated with the condition, but it's in the DSM-4 [the American Psychiatric Associati0n's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), the accepted roster of various mental conditions] as PTSD. And some veterans fear that deleting disorder will jeopardize the VA benefits they get for it."

So what do you think? Does the word Disorder matter? Does it have meaning? Does it add stigma? Is it truthful or in the way? We'd love to hear your comments.

Driver's ed to cope with PTSD

This is an excellent article about the challenges people with PTSD face while driving, and what one VA hospital is doing to help:

Palo Alto's VA Hospital offers driver's ed to cope with PTSD

Another hidden cost of war: 18 U.S. vets commit suicide every day

Mother Jones pointed out yesterday that American casualties during war are way down compared to previous wars.

But that ignores the fact that our soldiers are surviving the battlefield, then coming home and committing suicide. More than 18 of them every day, on average. Read more:

Veteran suicides exceed combat deaths: 18 per day