War Trauma draws on the experience of prior wars for valuable insights to help people who are now in the military or in the healing professions, and their families and communities, to deal with todays realities of combat and its aftermath -- which so often entails PTSD (post-traumatic stresss syndrome), depression and the risk of suicide. This is part three in A Vietnam Trilogy, which studies the psychiatric impact of war on soldiers and veterans, and their families. The effects go on for decades after the violence occurred, and we are still just learning to understand the depth and variety of problems it can cause. Further, Scurfield documents his proven innovative therapies for treating PTSD. This third volume looks at what military and mental health professionals -- and the Veterans Administration (VA) -- should have learned from the Vietnam War in order to better protect American servicemen and servicewomen in later conflicts and to help them recover afterwards. The Persian Gulf War, for instance, had an immense impact on veterans of all wars. The author was a national faculty member for joint VA-DOD training programs to enhance mental health response readiness for receiving anticipated medical and psychiatric casualties from the Persian Gulf War. What he found was a resurgence of selective amnesia and denial about the true impact of war. Scurfield notes, "Chillingly, what happened in Vietnam in 1968--69 regarding psychiatric casualties has enormous parallels to what is happening today regarding U.S. psychiatric casualties from the Iraq War."

Through the stories of veterans and the author's own understanding as a psychiatric social work officer in Vietnam and his extensive post-war experiences as a mental health professional, A Vietnam Trilogy describes the impact of war on veterans from a psy.

The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature provides an interdisciplinary exploration in early medical trauma treatment and the emergent postmodern canon of the 1960s and 1970s. By identifying key postmodern literary tropes (paranoia, uncanniness, biomediation) as products of an overarching post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) narrative paradigm, this concise study reveals unexplored aspects of the canonical novels at hand—such as the link between individual and collective traumatization—highlights the presence of epic elements in postmodern narratives, and identifies the influence of emerging psychiatric treatment on the post-WWII novels at hand. Performing a medical humanities reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), this book introduces a novel way of examining trauma at the intersection of narrative, history, and medicine and recalibrates the importance of postmodern politics of transformation, while making the case for an aesthetics of trauma. By examining the historico-political developments that dictated the formation of PTSD in the wake of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, this book argues that the perception of PTSD symptoms directly influenced aesthetic and literary tropes of the Cold War era.

In this study of the psychiatric impact of war on soldiers and veterans, Scurfield (social work, U. of Southern Mississippi) recounts his three different experiences in Vietnam, first, in 1968, as an Army social work officer working with psychiatric casualties, and in 1989 and 2000 when he and other veterans returned on missions of peace. Scurfield

For those veterans who do not respond productively to, or who have little interest in office-based, regimented, and symptom-focused treatments, the innovative approaches laid out in Healing War Trauma is the guidebook clinicians need to chart new paths to healing.

An original and groundbreaking book that examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer’s Iliad with Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In this moving, dazzlingly creative book, Dr. Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer’s Iliad with Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A classic of war literature that has as much relevance as ever in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is a “transcendent literary adventure” (The New York Times) and “clearly one of the most original and most important scholarly works to have emerged from the Vietnam War” (Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried).

Drawing on diverse fields, from neuroscience to anthropology, this title lets you consider the geographical, interpersonal, temporal, and spiritual transitions individuals experience when they move in and out of the camp and the impact their time outside the camp has on family and community.