Are veterans men or mice?

Are veterans men or mice?
De-tour Combat PTSD Survivor's Guide
Kathie Costos
July 27, 2013

There have been many reports of researchers tackling PTSD using mice. Mice? Yes, mice. Now they are implanting false memories in mice as if that has anything to do with being a veteran with PTSD. "The technique could lead to treatments for phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder in humans."

While the report comes out of Australia, they are doing it here in the US as well, among many other stupid mice tricks that would make even David Letterman blush.

While some researchers have done good work, especially with the brain scans of PTSD veterans along with showing the benefits of the holistic approach addressing the spirituality of veterans, not much else new has come out over the last decade.

That sends chills down the spines of researchers around the world looking toward the US for guidance. They are now sure after over 40 years of mind-numbing money being wasted we are still not using what works. We're seeing the results of our failures in the rise of military suicides, multiple attempted suicides within the military and as veterans go without proper care.

We see the bad numbers rise. The military scratches their heads trying to find excuses when the answer to their failure has been right under their nose for years. "Resilience" training is part of the problem, proven by the devastating rise in suicides, yet they push it pretending it is the solution. The VA has done a better job but when we consider that 57% of suicides tied to military service occurred after seeking treatment, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what they have doesn't work either.

What we know is totally different than what they have managed to consider. It is human nature not rodent.

How can mice know what it is like to have survivor guilt? Feel as if someone's death is their fault? Believe they are unworthy of love? What it is like to feel as if you just don't matter anymore, that what you did didn't mean anything or worse, that what you did was evil?

Do they know what it is like to pray from the pit of their soul? To need to be forgiven? To need to forgive someone else? Or do they know what it is like to carry around guilt because they cannot forgive themselves? Do they know what it is like to have hope slip away? Or to wake up one day when you can't even remember what having hope felt like?

Would a mouse risk life for another mouse? Never seen that done. Do they know what it is like to love strangers so deeply that their lives means more than their own?

While brains are pretty much all the same mechanically, they can only show what researchers are looking for. Under stress brains react. Terrorize a subject and they will react differently to the introduction of that terror again, no matter if it happens of not as long as the threat is there, they fear. Every creature on the planet experiences fear and learns from what they survived. Not every creature on the planet knows what it is like to grieve.

Don't wait for science to study the soul in relationship to Combat PTSD because if they can't see it, it doesn't matter and that, that is the answer they have been missing all along.

Want to see your veteran heal? Then fight the battle for them when they come home. They loved enough to be willing to die. You have to love them enough to fight to keep them alive.

Help them remember why they wanted to serve in the first place and that it was because they loved and that is one of the biggest reasons you still love them. If they did not have the ability to love that much, they wouldn't grieve as much as they do now.