The Evil Hours Read Online Free PDF

is strictly practical: a book attempting to address the causes and consequences of every kind of trauma would run thousands of pages and be filled with so many qualifiers and exceptions to every assertion that it would cease being a story with a narrative arc and become an encyclopedia. Further, as the definition of PTSD has continued to expand, including more and more types of stressors (some U.S. military psychiatrists, for example, have begun diagnosing drone operators with PTSD), the research community has struggled to keep pace. As a writer attempting to create some coherence in a subject sorely in need of it, I have chosen to exclude certain newer forms of the disease that await scientific consensus and focus on what some have called the “classic” traumatic stressors: war, rape, and natural disaster. This is not an attempt to privilege one type of trauma over another (though the field of trauma studies remains heavily skewed toward war trauma); instead, it is an attempt to make meaning out of the cacophony of an emerging scientific field by deliberately limiting my data set.
    This book is a biography, woven together with elements of my own autobiography, my attempt to tell the story of PTSD, beginning with the first glimpses of it in the historical record and then continuing as a sort of pilgrim to the battered temples our culture has erected to it, specifically the Veterans Administration, the U.S. military medical establishment, and the various civilian academic edifices that study it. But, before I tell the story of PTSD itself, we need to get a sense of the sorts of horrifying experiences that cause it and how it feels to a person in the middle of such an event. This is the subject of the next chapter, titled “Saydia” after the neighborhood in southern Baghdad where I spent a week as a reporter in 2007. The second chapter, “In Terror’s Shadow,” takes a slight step back to explore the broader medical questions of PTSD: Who suffers from it? Why do some people suffer from it and others don’t? Chapter 3 takes up the early history of trauma, beginning with the prescientific view of it, and examines the earliest traces of post-traumatic symptoms in Western history, a history that begins, ironically enough, in ancient Mesopotamia. In “The Haunted Mind,” we turn to the experiences of trauma survivors, including the hallucinations, the nightmares, and the altered states of consciousness that often define the post-traumatic condition. Stories of such hauntings have a substantial place in the literature of trauma, and in this book I argue that the post-traumatic state is one of liminality, an existence between realms that causes great confusion for both the survivor and the society to which he or she belongs. In Chapter 5, we explore the modern history of trauma, including its role in the American Civil War, the world wars, and the Vietnam War, the single most important event in the history of psychological trauma.
    This book was written for very selfish reasons, as an attempt to answer some pretty basic questions: Why does the world seem so different since I got back from Iraq? Why do I feel so out of place now? What does one do with the knowledge gleaned from a near-death experience? But as a former Marine, I was also driven by a larger desire to understand how the current war on post-traumatic stress is being waged, to get a sense of how it is being run by the VA and the larger medical community, and to make my own independent assessment, my own reconnaissance, of the field. The second half of
The Evil Hours
is, among other things, the story of this reconnaissance. In “Therapy,” we look at the leading therapeutic modalities and how they work, which is based on my first-person experience with them and on my own research into the science and philosophy that inform them. In “Drugs,” we explore the various pharmaceutical interventions that modern medicine has