The pain, suffering, and displacement that often come with such a traumatic event is an ever-present aspect of the violence a war brings with it.
The emotions and circumstances connected to such violence are commonly known as “war trauma” and could easily come with long-term consequences to someone’s mental health and well-being.
So what exactly is war trauma? In other words, it’s a blanket statement meant to cover any traumatic event experience while also preparing for, living through, as well as serving in a war.
Adults and children alike can truly feel the impact of war. In fact, according to a 2022 Children in Conflict report from Save the Children, 468 million young people worldwide live in a “conflict zone,” and 1.7 billion young people (two out of three) live somewhere in a country deeply impacted by conflict.
Sometimes, children can also be used as spies, soldiers, or even cooks in conflicts, according to Unicef reports.
War trauma is what soldiers end up with after battling in combat zones, where they witness atrocities such as mass death and destruction.
While this is undoubtedly the case, war trauma can also impact civilians in war zones and active duty members who are not stationed in direct combat.
“Support personnel and medical personnel generally come back with trauma from seeing, treating, and sometimes even hearing about traumatic events,” as Dr. Christopher Hansen, a licensed professional counselor and a clinical supervisor at Thriveworks in San Antonio, Texas, explained. Here are some of the most important things worth noting about war trauma:
What causes it
Just like with any other lasting painful experience, war trauma can take a lot of forms, both for soldiers and civilians. According to Hansen and Dr. Jim Jackson, a trauma expert and also a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt Medical Center, some of the most important causes of war trauma are:
- witnessing war unfold
- direct combat experience
- watching people get wounded, mutilated, killed
- inflicting pain and killing someone else
- giving orders that can lead to other people’s pain and death
All these traumas might be experienced by soldiers even in their training period, but also while being deployed. A range of factors can easily determine whether someone develops war trauma, and to what degree it can impact them. Here’s a broad overview of all the factors that can cause war trauma:
Inadequate training
Soldiers should try to undergo serious training before deployment, which can later help them prepare for what they have to face. However, the quality of those exercises can also determine how much trauma affects them.
People who have been consistently trained and indoctrinated into the right mental health resources go through this experience much better than the personnel that doesn’t have this type of training.
Even so, more often than not, training can’t prepare you fully for every eventuality or situation in war, but it can instill confidence, muscle memory, as well as resilience. The realities that need to be faced during training can also cause trauma.
Previous trauma
Your mental state and past experiences can easily set the tone for how some things will impact you, war trauma included. People who lived through trauma before being in a war, and who might still be dealing with the mental consequences of it have a much higher likelihood of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from deployment.
Constant exposure
One traumatic experience can definitely have a negative impact, but constant exposure to painful events can truly take a more intense toll.
Moreover, repeated exposures to trauma can really make people more prone to struggling with mental health and functional issues of different kinds.
The same with war trauma, meaning that the more regularly people are exposed to war, the more intense their trauma can be.
All these instances can especially affect someone in the long term, when witnessing something (for potentially having to do something) is at odds with their own set of morals.
Mental health conditions that can stem from war trauma
Worse than the fact that an individual might experience war trauma is the fact that it can greatly affect their long-term mental health.
Trauma generally affects each person quite differently, and can even cause or exacerbate mental health issues, particularly PTSD. According to a 2019 report from the World Health Organization, 22% of people who currently live in conflict areas suffer from mental health disorders, like PTSD, anxiety, and depression.
For 9% of people, this condition is moderate to severe. Here are some of the most well-known mental health conditions that could easily stem from war trauma:
PTSD
PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that stems from going through or learning about one or more traumatic events. Some of its symptoms include emotional numbness, difficulties with cognition, and memory, dissociation, reduced and complete lack of pressure for things that were previously enjoyable, and physical pain such as headaches.
According to the National Center for PTSD, around 7% of veterans are bound to experience PTSD at some point in their lives, compared to 6% of civilians.
But the number can jump straight to 13%, when looking specifically at women veterans. One of the main causes of this can be military sexual trauma, which means that one in three women veterans who got Veterans Affairs healthcare reported experiencing it. The same applied to one in 50 men.
PTSD is by far one of the most prevalent mental health diagnoses suffered by people who experience military sexual trauma. As a whole, people who use Veterans Affairs healthcare have a much higher rate of PTSD at 23%.
Anxiety and depression
As far as mental health disorders go, trauma is often the most associated with PTSD. However, people who experience war trauma can also develop anxiety and depression.
In fact, according to all the mental health professionals we have discussed so far, these conditions can appear on their own or at the same time with PTSD. Military sexual assault, to be more specific, is often associated with depression.
Treatment for trauma
PTSD and all the other mental health conditions aren’t always easy to prevent in those who experience trauma, like service members.
But having strong support systems on hand, and working with mental health professionals before entering a new war zone is more often than not extremely beneficial.
Effective war trauma treatment options can aid people in coping with mental health conditions, such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety. PTSD-specific treatment can be especially significant in helping someone work through the disorder.
What are some of the most efficient treatments for war trauma-induced PTSD? Luckily, there are a handful of therapies that have been proven as efficient, like cognitive processing therapy (CPT), prolonged exposure therapy (PE), and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).
All these therapies can drastically improve outcomes, reduce PTSD symptoms, and enable people to live a better, more functional life, whether it’s home, work, or relationships.
Veterans and civilians who went through a traumatic event in war can also benefit from mental healthcare at any given point in their lives.
This support may come from various places, including veteran-oriented organizations like “Veterans Affairs” or any other mental health provider.
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