The Evil Hours Read Online Free PDF Page B

devised to treat PTSD, a set of interventions that, it turns out, is surprisingly feeble, with one possible exception—a beta-blocker known as propranolol that is so old its patent expired thirty years ago. (Big Pharma, it turns out, hasn’t yet figured out a way to make much money off PTSD.) Given this fact, it is perhaps unsurprising that a wealth of therapeutic approaches outside the medical mainstream has emerged to treat PTSD. In “Alternatives,” we examine the stunningly fertile field of alternative trauma therapy and how many of these therapies challenge our basic Western assumptions about medicine. Some of the most successful approaches to trauma, in fact, aren’t really “therapies” in the normal clinical sense, as they are simply applied practices and activities that someone decided might be worth trying out on trauma survivors. Yoga, for instance, which is increasingly viewed as a powerful PTSD treatment, doesn’t really have much to say about trauma as a formal subject. Instead, yoga simply aims to bring the body and mind into greater harmony—full stop.
    The overarching design of this book is to take the reader from the underworld of trauma, its dark and confounding depths to the various stages of its aftermath, considering the ways that scientists and other thinkers have conceptualized it over the years, and continuing to perhaps the most radical proposition of all: that many people do, in fact,
grow
from trauma and become better human beings as a result of almost dying. The idea of post-traumatic growth was one I came to grudgingly. Like many of the leading clinicians, I found the idea of essentially flipping PTSD on its head, looking for a silver lining in the emotional carnage, to be insulting at first. Nevertheless, after interviewing a number of survivors of near-death experiences, I came kicking and screaming to the conclusion that much of what we call “post-traumatic stress” is, in fact, the failure of our culture to encourage people to seek wisdom in their loss and adversity and to consider trauma in anything other than a narrow medical context.
    I have called this book a “biography” of PTSD, a description that is apt given the life the disease has taken on, a life far beyond what its VVAW architects could possibly have imagined. And as much as this book is an attempt to tell the story of PTSD, to recount the basic history and science of this surprisingly complex condition, it is also an attempt to examine the disease’s other life in the culture at large and how it has become a sort of global lingua franca, a label, an identity, a way of understanding the self, a cultural meme, a political interest group, a scientific mythology, and even a theory of time.

1
SAYDIA
    T HROUGH THE SMALL , thick Humvee window, the city was dirty and gray, a charcoal drawing sketched across the horizon.Sand moved over the blacktop. Along the roadside, the sagging arms of dead power lines hung from one blackened light pole to the next. The sun beat down on everything: the palm trees, the cinderblock houses, the dirty boulevards that led from nowhere to nowhere. There was something almost cunning in the layout of the city, in the way it could swallow entire armies, reduce them to chaos, as if to repudiate the idea that fortresses needed walls.
    â€œWhen were you in the Corps?” a captain named Vollmer asked from the front passenger seat.
    â€œâ€™94 to ’98,” I said.
    â€œInfantry?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œEver go to Okinawa?”
    â€œYeah, I did a pump there with Three-Five.”
    â€œI was stationed at Schwab, up-island.”
    â€œNo shit?”
    â€œThird Recon. I was a jarhead before I went into the army.”
    I had resigned my commission so long before that it felt almost shameful to bring it up. My time in the Marine Corps had been brief and uneventful, boring even—nothing of consequence had happened, a fact that