TED Talk: Sebastian Junger "Our lonely society makes it hard to come home from war"

Today we watched a TED Talk about PTSD and its causes. Sebastian Junger states that he had a minor case of Temporary PTSD when he came home from a trip to war, but ended up having it go away rather quickly. The problem is, however, when soldiers come back from war and they end up with chronic PTSD that lasts for years and years, and the rates seemed to be going up.

TED Talk Sebastian Junger 

Junger concluded that the PTSD rates that were going up weren't from more trauma, but by how the soldiers were treated when the war was over. He thought over the Apaches and Cherokee Indian tribes that he had studied in college and wondered why the rates of PTSD hadn't been high in these nations that battled frequently with the US or other tribes. He decided that the reason was because they went home to a tribe that understood what they'd been through. He realized that since these soldiers were leaving their close knit platoon to a lonely society, they were going to have higher rates of trauma that might not actually be there. He says that depression in society goes up the wealthier people are because people lose those bonds. After 9/11 people all bonded over that trauma, so soldiers were less traumatized after war during the time the country was unified. Now that the country is starting to break apart again, people are experiencing more long term PTSD.