The western medical community mostly agrees now that PTSD is a serious condition brought on by extreme trauma, and it is diagnosed by its symptoms:

• Intrusive memories, presenting as flasbacks and/or dreams;
• Hyperousal, presenting as being easily startled, hearing or seeing things that are not real, insomnia, irritability, anger, and/or self-destructive behavior;
• and avoidance, presenting as avoiding talking about the trauma, emotional numbness or coldness, memory and concentration problems, difficulty maintaining intimate relationships, and depression.

As detailed by the Washington Post recently, our nation built a security infrastructure at rapid speed (visit the entire Top Secret America site for yourself), out of the scraps of our fear, and now we have a web of lies, silos, back alleys, secret technology and laws that have completely stripped our privacy and our civil rights. It hangs over our heads, lurks around us in the shadows and hides in plain sight on our phones, computers and police cars. But like any defense put up by the traumatized mind, it is full of holes, too thin to hold from the very start, and frays.

Complex PTSD (what I like to call the Tackabery variant in my lighter moods) causes psychiatric injury (brain damage which appears in brain scans) and results from repeated exposure to traumatic stress. It’s not just the event–it’s the events. Again, and again, and again. A major marker of complex PTSD is captivity–the inability to escape from the traumatic stress. Abused and molested children and spouses in abusive domestic situations (ding ding ding!) are obvious examples.

It may seem a stretch to some that an entire nation could be experiencing complex PTSD, but I see the signs. Barriers built up via psychological, electronic and other means, which put the bad guys on one side and us, the poor innocent Americans, on the other? Classic avoidance behavior. Just like the vet who holes up in his house with a gun and shoots anything that moves. Which pretty much describes the U.S. of A. right now, if you ask me. And the end of that road? Well . . . for me it was suicide, which I survived. Most PTSD victims don’t survive suicide-by-cop, however.

But, you know, it’s just a theory, and hey, I’m on medication. What do I know?

When news of this player’s injury was announced, I was flamed on StateFans for saying that the details of what happened to him mattered when deciding whether to support his rehab fund. I understand the principle of forgiveness and I do wish the family well, but I can’t support someone who got into a car and drove while impaired. I was accused of being judgmental, throwing stones, etc. But I feel compelled to argue again that someone has to stand up and say no when asked to support something that goes against what I consider a fundamental ethical, moral issue. Getting in a car when you are too drunk to drive it is a choice that puts hundreds of people at risk of death–whole families and communities, and not all of them are basketball players with people cheering for their sincere athletic efforts. And I can’t reward that behavior even if it means not helping someone who is injured, because this behavior has to cease.

I sincerely regret and feel sorry for what happened to this man and I know his friends and family are doing everything they can to help him. He’s lucky. But we have to be vigilant in changing our world, and changing our standards in the name of forgiveness is not the way to do it. In North Carolina we continually put people who are charged with DWI back on the road, over and over again. On average, a first-time DWI offender has driven drunk 87 times before he was arrested.

Get the facts straight and stop talking about forgiveness. Start stopping drunk driving.

Columbine by Dave Cullen

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been participating in a discussion on Goodreads with Dave Cullen, the writer of Columbine. Dave wrote about the Columbine incident for Salon.com and his book was very, very powerful. My husband didn’t understand why I exposed myself to the story, but I felt I needed to understand why this thing happened. I found out that Eric Harris was a psychopath and that Dylan Klebold was a depressive who had gotten so far down into his depression that he struck out at those he blamed for it. I learned a lot about how depression can turn into violence, especially in men, although this can happen in women too. You can learn more about the link between depression and violence in adolescents in this excellent article by Dr. Allan Cooperstein.

I was saddened to hear that Dave struggled with PTSD after the Columbine incident and also during the writing of the book. In a revealing article he wrote for Borders, Dave talks about his experiences with PTSD:

School shootings hit me a lot harder since I got to know all those kids at Columbine. This time, it was a 60 Minutes segment called “Bumfights”: teenagers beating up street people for the fun of it. Kids smacked a helpless sleeping drunk with a stick. They returned with bigger sticks. They bashed a guy in the head with a two-by-four, with an exposed nail. They beat him to death.

The writing stopped. I drifted from overwhelming sadness to anxiety attacks. A Hemingway quote from A Farewell To Arms kept running through my head: The world crushes everyone… The world crushes everyone… The world crushes everyone…

I looked the quote up later. The word crush does not appear. Hemingway said “breaks.” Breaking everyone is bad enough, but I didn’t feel a snap coming, I felt a ferocious weight bearing down. I dreamed of each vertebrae ground to cinder, one by one.

Since reading the book, I’ve thought often about Harris and Klebold’s strange attraction for each other, and the terrible vortex they created between themselves that led to so much death. There was a lot of discussion after the killings about the music they listened to; Harris and Klebold listened to a lot of the music I listen to, so I took that personally at the time, as I don’t recall ever building pipe bombs in my parents’ basement and planning on blowing up my school. I still don’t believe music or video games makes anyone do anything, but they can contribute to atmosphere, and the more you indulge in an atmosphere, the more twisted your perspective can become. The music still won’t make you do murder. But you can get to the point where the darkness is all you can see.

Willingly drawing down that darkness is what must be avoided at all costs. That will must be applied toward reaching towards the light. I don’t believe the darkness is stronger. But the atmosphere … the atmosphere can be very, very tempting. It’s like a whirling dervish dance; it feels like ecstasy, but it’s the wrong drug entirely.