Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20150315

And recovery in the aftermath of war. Im a combat veteran of the iraq war and the combat wounded veteran. My second book plenty of time when we get home of the recovery in the aftermath of war calls my familys journey after my husband sustained dramatic brain injury and subsequently develop postTraumatic Stress disorder so it is with personal and professional interest im pleased to sit down today with david morris to have a conversation about his book the evil hour a biography of postTraumatic Stress disorder. I was wondering if you could start off by telling me a little bit about your self and why you wanted to write this book. Guest in some ways i had always lived in the shadows most of my early adult life because my first adult years were in ten years in uniform including rotc so i was aware of the idea of ptsd that it was something that soldiers were associated with and my dad was a vietnam veteran and i grew up in suburban san diego. So i felt like i grew up in the shadow of the vietnam. I was always part of the conversation into this lingering shadow of my childhood. So i always had a general awareness of it and then when i served in the military with the idea of the general sense and then in 2004 i was at the marine corps and did my first tour as an embedded reporter in iraq and came back and noticed immediately getting off the plane in california and feeling different and going to a bar and they took me to a bar right here at the airport and we went to a club and iran for looking out over the people and i could tell everyone was drinking and talking and socializing and just as they had before nothing has changed. And i remember there was no particular reason to feel angry upset but it struck me that i have changed. And i remember oddly not being suddenly very bored and uninterested with what was going on and i went to use the atm at a local liquor store. So i went in and the owner of the story was from baghdad so i ended up talking with him and i was just off the plane not really fitting in and what do i do, i walked next door and there was a strange feeling returning to my early days of 2004 i was also angry about the war and how i have been at the tail end of the first battle of falluja and i have seen dreams from my regimen that were explained to me what they saw was a gross mismanagement, poor leadership and irrational policy process and then a few weeks later no wmd and then i was in iraq in 2004 and just a few months later in November George w. Bush was reelected and so for me that was a very difficult process to understand that in light of everything that had happened all of the lives have been exposed in 2003 and 2004 it was difficult for me to accept that people live in the face of knowledge of that information turn and we liked the person that had put us in there in the first place. And as i began researching and i begin to develop symptoms of my own there is a Movie Theater in 2009 there was an ied explosion that closely resembled one that i was in and it was a shot from the point of view where i would be and the cinematic experience was overwhelming for me and i actually sort of blackout and when i regained full consciousness i was in the hallway of the cineplex and snuck back into the theater and no one was having this difficulty and i asked my girlfriend at the time it happened. So i begin to sense on a personal level but not all was right upstairs and that i didnt have full control of my memories memories. One interview for the book told me having ptsd was like having memories gone wild. They have their own take on their lives. Is it, that was one of the impetus for me to examine ptsd not just in a personal level but also a historical entity because i was curious what a lot of people, a lot of marines and veterans i sort of thought of ptsd as a copout as a shortcut not to having a authentic, honest, emotional engagement with the service in the postwar service. I thought it was a way to dodge responsibility. Until i started looking into it and until i started having the symptoms. And what i discovered is the people that fought for the ptsd diagnosis felt very similarly to how i felt and the founder of the group that advocated for the ptsd diagnosis in the 70s basil the founder in his view there was no distinction to be made between the politics of vietnam and our own personal psychological struggle and out of that conversation and acknowledgment came the diagnosis that we have today. Host so you look at the personal historical the literary and scientific aspect of ptsd. You just touched on the history being the conceptualized and modern era but what do you think is the most interesting thing that youve learned about the history of what we now call ptsd . Its been around since 1980s about as long as Cable Television but it seems like a lot of people that it was recognized that it was a permanent thing that was always central to the human condition that was always out there and what i found when i began researching it is that its not exactly the case. And for instance Jared Diamond who is a geographer in new guinea and who are thought to be some of the best prescientific and he began discussing those that post the battle for the travel warriors often have nightmares and if a nightmare was something that you could find in the furthest reaches host very common in the current sufferers. Guest its the symptom of ptsd the nightmare. They are theoretically in mortal universal and central to the current. But there are other aspects of it that have evolved and that is one of the argument that i make in the book is the culture is more important than biology and ptsd. And how we are trained to experience and manifest the symptoms and a flashback is also considered to be one of the ptsd ptsd. Researchers at Kings College went back and examined the memoirs and accounts of the soldiers who had served before the age of cinema and discovered that the flashback was really not fair and he is accounts. And furthermore if you look at the account of the civil war veterans, they are far more likely to describe their intrusive symptoms by spirits ghosts and demons and the civil war period was a far more religious time in our own so there is a sense that you get that it does influence how people manifest the symptoms and now in the flashback that i deleted to earlier was originally the term borrowed from the world of film to describe a break in the story. So it appears in this film they have become central to how we see the human consciousness but its part of how ptsd works. So to answer your question there are aspects that appear to be universal and other aspects that appear to be under the influence of the society that they emerge from so its interesting it is a mix of both immortality and a longstanding history and also an evolution and that was surprising to me. You think of a flashback as a permanent thing but it has evolved. Host what do you think other survivors can learn from reading literature . Guest in the book i argue for instance the foundation of literature you do see evidence of ptsd. Jonathans work and the bomb kind of changed the conversation about the trauma and you see them feeling the survivors calls and so there is this evidence that you can find in the idea who was this super warrior ultimate veteran in a lot of ways that someone like that could suffer lingering psychological stress after war could be comforting because it is this very old thing that people have suffered for as long as human beings have fought each other which is forever. And so i think that in the book i argue that literature is a very powerful medicine and something that the physicians and psychologists in particular dont think much about and dont dwell on the value of the work but literature has an extraordinarily powerful impact in a measurable medical impact in terms of teaching you in bringing you closer in touch with your own interstate and sense of emotion. A lot of veterans are unable to because of the military they train you to function and to focus on Mission Completion of the expense often times. They generally offer people the experience to understand they are not alone and their struggles are of immortality and secondarily get a greater sense of the emotional lives of lies that a person can conceptualize their story and think about their own war experience. And i think a lot about the things they carry in the greater sense of how tim obrien in his other works as well is like a combat zone that talk about what his homecoming experience was like. So there was in many cases there was actual psychotherapy that you read about. The most powerful impacting psychotherapy that the va has and that are used to treat ptsd across the board often focus on this idea of the narrative of discovering in the way to conceptualize yourself as a person in the world. Its a way to explain and help us understand how the stories can be told because a lot of people if you grew up on television and film which is rich in a lot of cases you dont develop that or get a sense of how the stories are told. After the trojan war he wanders for ten years and is literally homeless which in some ways is a before for the homecoming experience in america and the idea of travel as a medicine and display ofthis way of changing itself and so to see how people can find themselves through wandering and how that played out in that way can be extraordinarily powerful and its measurable. It doesnt sound like an english teacher kind of thing to say read a book. Novels will save your life but they have measured the impact in particular they found that reading a book was one of the most novel and effective ways to prepare for the job interview. As for a variety of reasons there is a scientifically measurable impact that they have on people. Host your book is not a novel that i would love if you would read a Senate Debate could separate excerpt from it. I would love for you to share that with us. Us. Guest this is from the Second Chapter in the terrorist shadow and what i was trying to do here was after some brief and more material step back and examine the larger role where the book was to get as close to the idea of the symptoms and the research and then asked the same time step back and try to conceptualize it in a larger philosophical framework. We are born in battling the world. Its what happens when you catch a surprise glimpse into the coming annihilation of the body and the mind but also of the world. Its the savagery of the universe made manifest within us and it destroys not only the integrity of consciousness but the myth of mastery and also the ability to live peacefully with others. Almost as if it were a virus coming pathogen content to nothing except replicatedonothing except replicate itself and the world. Over and over until only they remained. Its the glimpse of truth that tells us the lie that love is impossible and peace is an illusion. Therapy and medication can ease the pain but neither can they mixed a survivor to emcee the darkness and into another to unknow the secret that lies beneath the surface of life. Host thank you. One of the things that struck me in that passage is that you are referring to trying to replicate itself and i noted several other places in the book you give agency to things to talk about the universe scheming to wipe us out and the world is designed to hurt us and if you can give as an example to seeing the patterns in things and if you believe in fate. Guest with respect to the first question i think one of the reasons i wanted to that the book is a biography of post Traumatic Stress disorder and one of the problems i had when i began researching the topic is that most of the journalism was relating to ptsd and much of the science simply recounts and recapitulates and gives a general idea about how it exists in the world into the symptoms and how it goes from accounting on that. They talk about how the disease has a life of their own and this applies to all technologies. We look at the symptoms and exterior parts of it and how it exists in the world and how it manifests itself in the interior parts of the human being but it has its own way of being in the world and so i was interested to know to think about and to sort of answer to this idea of the being in the world that enters the body and exacts its agenda on us. I compared to a virus i dont look at it as in terms of its treatment or conceptualization. Depending how you treat the metaphor it does have a contagious aspect to it and thats whats interesting when you talk about the cycle of violence and the repetition you find war veterans pr often frequently waged to fix or a just or improve upon the legacy. We invaded iraq in large measure because we didnt finish the gulf war and there is the relationship of one trauma exacting itself and then on another level repeating itself and trying to recreate itself in another way and people that come from abusive families find themselves in situations where they repeat the trauma inadvertently and unconsciously and so there is a viral aspect that is fascinating and unnerving antivirus is since im not a cancer or aids researcher but speaking to some researchers recently there is this idea out there that viruses exist only to replicate. That is their major function. So it is something that is interesting because that sort of is situated in the medical literature interestingly. Additionally, one of the ideas, one of the reasons i wanted to write the book is to make sense of the journalist overseas and i have served in the infantry in the mid1990s and had left before 9 11 began writing and then 9 11 happened and we invaded iraq and all of my buddies were over there, everyone i went to college with there was virtually my unit universe have deployed to iraq so i went for those reasons that i i had always been drawn to extreme experiences. Im a surfer, i spent a lot of time in extreme environments and i learned a lot about myself and its a great way of being in the world because you see is pushed to its extreme and you get insights into the nature of existence and so i kept going back to iraq because i thought there was some way i had a sort of mystical idea that the longer i stayed there into the closer the more spiritual insight i would get into the closer i get and i discovered the larger you stay there and the more the fatigue makes its way into your body begin to notice connections that were invisible to you before. And i dove into this in the book in a number of different ways with one of the most striking was the day before i hit my ambush i was in a humvee with a bunch of soldiers who were all from latin america. They were in the u. S. Army that born in guatemala to el salvador and one of the soldiers asked me have you ever been blown up before sir which as you know, talking about this is from my perspective do not talk about ieds because you are tempting fate and so in my view that is the last question you ask someone in a combat zone is have you ever been shot at because you are inviting it on yourself and so in a way it did surprise me when i hit when the next day because the soldier had spoken my fate so there is a sort of mystical connection finding connections where there shouldnt be connections and noticing patterns that were invisible to you before. These sort of things were a huge part of my experience and why i kept coming back as i felt i was learning there was and is apparent knowledge, the spiritual insight about the nature of existence that was becoming available to me the longer i stay there. So i reflect on the book that is clearly an altered state of consciousness be leaving those sort of things so thats part of the term of the universe. Opt that often conceptualizes and that was for me even while i was there it felt there was this other side of the paranormal or the other world that was present in my war experience. Host so when i talk about my experience i sometimes joke going on my first book tour with my own special version of therapy because i got to talk about them as things that i have experienced so its like what is it like to watch someone. So i was interested to read your discussion of your experience with prolonged exposure therapy at the va. Something that you called sadistic indistinguishable from torture and punitive reconditioning. I was curious if you were at all concerned using that type of language might deter some people from seeking terrorists. Guest to back up for a second, prolonged exposure is the number one individual psychotherapy and its loosely based on the ideas of reconditioning a person and theres the psychological learning theory that is updated by the university of pennsylvania researcher. And if the therapist asks you to recount the story. Very common. One of the most in the world today. However, i found it to be Research Shows it does work in 60 of the cases most to get benefits from it. I had a very adverse reaction to it and what i found is my ambush in baghdad on october 10, 2007 i was asked to recount the story dozens of times and for me i found no relief in that and in fact what i found was the same vendor myself in my blood the same toxins i felt in my bloodstream when i was in baghdad and run on the and the feeling of being on point on the knifes edge. A lot of the feelings that had been dormant had been stirred up like a fish tank. They were awakened and i didnt know anything about prolonged exposure. I did what they asked me to and they put me in this particular figure p. But as i did subsequent research, i discovered that my experience and my adverse reaction was not only on kind of a three on a vehicle and it has been documented by a number of researchers specifically roger at Harvard Medical School had discovered that they had gotten some very Adverse Reactions that they had been trying exposure therapy on so the question for me became why did this happen, why is it not working and by is the va spending so much money on this particular research on this therapeutic modality and what i discovered were a number of things that the idea behind the prolonged exposure was originally they adapted the ptsd therapy and it tends to be in most cases a onetime event and not an extended 15 month cumulative small trauma situation which is much more descriptive of the combat veteran. They are by Clearing House for the research in the world and they spend more time and money and resources on the problem than anyone else. They have no peers in this realm and theyve come up with an extraordinarily efficient massproduced therapy thats getting relief as we speak. However with respect to the prolonged exposure, that Therapy Works very neatly into the classical theory and it appeals to the researchers because researchers because it has a very clear when he edged back to the dawn of psychology and ivan pavlov and it does work in many cases. One of my good friends, but out of love for lucia veteran of salt which worse than i did and it worked wonders for him. However i think that there are a lot of side effects that are not being addressed by david a. And specifically it is interesting because this speaks to the medicalization that is the major problem today. We treat it like we treat strep throat based on the perceptions and research and knowledge and wisdom gained from people in the white lab coated physician who have taken it very far in terms of public health. However, it is rare to meet a psychiatrist was a cultist whos been in a combat zone. There is a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of combat trauma. If you talk to the Veterans Committee thatveteranscommittee that spent months in helmand from the province of which i know several marines in most cases its not a single ambush that can be excised or treated with exposure. Its often a host of dozens of dozens of events living in the shadow of death for literally four is, for months and months. I think there needs to be a reassessment of the modality and how to better conceptualize the idea of the combat as an existential events that impacts the entire individual and not simply a onetime event that can be treated with the antibiotic of prolonged exposure. Host the next treatment you talked about was the cognitive processing therapy and you refer to that as yankee optimism that solves nothing but acknowledged the skills and tools help you get out of bed in the morning. And as you mentioned you have some concerns over medical icing and focusing on treating the symptoms might actually go so far to encourage governments to wage war and silent, survivors. Can you dig into that a little more deeply because i can definitely understand where youre coming from with that but at the same time i can imagine the interpretation of giving people the tools to manage their symptoms enables them to speak so i think for example about a friend of mine that was assaulted in the military and because of the success of therapy is able to get out of bed in the morning and leave the house and cope with traffic and take the match route and sit on capitol hill and testify before the house and Senate Committees about the experience of assault i wonder if you could dig into the paradox of willmore. One of the things to recognize is that it is a moral argument. They will enact them on other human beings and it is an argument that says there are longterm psychological enduring costs to both of those events. And as a result we should be careful on how we wage the war to think more excessively on how they are treated in society and we do a much better job than we are in the military and civilian life to protect women and ensure their safety. Before it was recognized, people thought that you were either killed and wounded and then after the words he went home and went on with your life, so there is an aspect of ptsd should echo and shouldnt be minimized in any way. Thats one of the arguments of the initial architects of the psychiatrist from yale first began advocating for what became ptsd was concerned. He was trained in the psychoanalytic tradition as a psychiatrist but his concern because he was very politically active he was very concerned that this argument that ptsd has a anan entity as an objection to the american warmaking machinery if that were treated strictly as a technical matter in which it is treated today, one of the first concerns as they were advocating to get this recognized was that it would be essentially neutered by medicine which has largely happened in my opinion. There is which i think has been for the better. Robert clifton was very much a man of the left, an iconic man of the left and it would be an accurate and a distortion to say you have to be a lefty to give ptsd and if you are republican its not for you and as a result of this, its been medicalized and mainstream in psychiatry and it has become treated as a biological disorder. It is more a political and less of an argument against the war and more of a tradition that arises and can be treated. So i think there is an all of the original architects theyve all grown out of the protest movement in the 1970s mind you, they were all very concerned in more of the motivations for advocating for ptsd recognition was to decrease the likelihood of a war to think about and step back and ask moral questions of the american way of worth. I think its important that without the protest movement in the 1970s and without the political content we wouldnt have ptsd. Thereve been a number of occasions after world war i and after the holocaust and the nations in the british and israelis had opportunities to institutionalize Something Like ptsd and did not. So its interesting that it came out of the protest movement in the 1970s so the large argument was one of the most powerfully impacted ideas for me to think about the idea that veterans can be damaged by the war and its something that is because all of society must bear because we live in a world view and i both know better than most that only 1 of americans that but serve in the military. And they are in extended. So i want it to be taken seriously and im glad that the media covers it with a seriousness that because it is important to think about there should be the nursery of all of the American Foreign policy. We need to think about the cost of the war. Host tell us more about the component of ptsd and you mentioned how the prevalence after the natural disasters may be than the personal violence within the friendly fire incidents is leading to higher rates and i think thats related to that feeling of betrayal and is that going to to moral injury . Guest thats one of the arguments i make in the book and why i argue that culture is more important and about than the biology and the social realm is more important than the biological realm with respect to ptsd. The most toxic form, 55, around 50 of rape victims develop ptsd in the long term. 50 . So take that figure and then you look at the warfare for example in iraq and afghanistan and the rate of diagnosis cover the best rate so it is a recorder of what they tend to suffer and then you take that 12 to 15 and compare that against people who survived tsunamis were earthquakes or volcanoes or normal natural disasters and the diagnosis is four or 5 for the future with the victims and the device figure with natural disasters and you compare and okay what is the significant difference between those two phenomenon and it is a social idea of betrayal by people being essentially predators on other humans and that is also a component of the war. Its not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Its something that human beings do to other human beings. Speaking for myself, this is why the rink on justice of the iraq war and the politics for which no cost has ever been assessed in the Political Class in the United States that was one reason for me why if that was a blow to my belief in the United States it felt to me it was a betrayal and they had victories stolen from them and theyve been asked to go to the city and then halfway through they been told no not a good idea and they felt betrayed by the leadership if so for me and a lot of veterans and im speaking atabout federal iraq veterans who were friends of mine it is the sense of betrayal by the natural disco National Leadership which there is accountability after began on theres never been an accountability for the runup to the iraq war. Now im speaking in some sense out of turn because a lot of people come a coming a lot of republican members get very upset when i make this argument with them but for me this was one of the reasons i wanted to write the book is to understand how one conceptualizes politics in the realm and the break brake and social trust if you feel that you have been betrayed by the society that wouldnt protect you and failed to protect you and the men in your life but failed to protect you depending on the circumstances these issues and these questions are what harm the survivors. You write about and quoted other veterans expressing concerns about letting go of memories. I wonder if you think its possible to work through and release the negative reactions associated with the memories while also keeping the memories themselves. Guest the short answer is yes. As we talked about earlier i having retold the story being blown up a few hundred times has become less and its easier to talk about stuff and having written about one of the things i have questions i wanted to answer and i wanted to do in a thorough way that speaks to the shape of the book. But there is the addiction to trauma and extremity and adrenaline and experiences and you see what they often call repeat offenders. And i know a number of marines even when i was in the peacetime court it would end and they would cross that connection because they didnt really want to go home and there is a feeling even for veterans who get out and leave the service and live in stateside america not being able to let go and not being so addicted to their memories and not wanting to let them go for a variety of reasons rated number one because they loved it so much into was the best moment of their lives. Why would they not want to think about it in the second, a lot of the veterans say my nightmares are an honor to my buddy. Host its really troubling when you think that its really heavy to think about this. The person that a veteran is so impacted and this speaks to the gravity of the ptsd as it expresses itself in a lot of cases is that this veteran is actually saying my subconscious damaged is my way of honoring my buddy. And its a common thing. So in some ways i would argue for myself personally, ive tried to for my own personal experience one thing that i decided is that therapy is very helpful and there are a lot and its very helpful. Hes a sick greater steps walter reed. They are in the literature and fly through this on a very deep level. And i discovered, you know they all influence the writing of the book but i discovered for me personally via she was very powerful but then i also decided that as a matter of posttraumatic growth of wanting to make something positive of it i needed to leave something behind and some of the things i left behind were this in some ways my former very infantry officer in International Math mystery and letting those go to say i can go to afghanistan working as a reporter there and it will be an extension of what ive already done but something that we knew why i kind of wanted to be come i didnt want to go to afghanistan because i knew the longer that i stated there is like lost time. You cant get that time back but when you are also in the war it makes it every day you spend deployed overseas makes it that much harder to come back and live a life so i wanted to leave that part of myself behind. Host was this a form of treatment for you . Guest totally. And it was a therapeutic experience. I am not against writing a therapy that i am against publication of therapy. But in the memoir she had spoken about this and i tend to agree with her that a journal can be an extraordinarily powerful medicine working for keeping a journal entry courting her feelings in processing your feelings can be extraordinarily healing. Both books but im familiar with that sort of used the publication process as a way of airing and just merely sorting through their own i am opposed because im like a snob i guess. I like being in the hands of a writer that does what they are doing and is using it is simply a way of unloading their personal issues on me. I like to have some sort of echo that has a sense of their own word. Host what do you think is more important the therapist or the therapy of the treatment modality that was chosen . Guest to be honest the therapist. Theres a lot of research that factors into my answer to that question but interestingly, a researcher in the 70s looks at the question and assigned a number of therapists using the modalities to treat the patients and has a control researcher took english professors to the university in a couple of basic support therapeutic needs and then compares the Research Results across the board and found the professors performed as well. It would have been with a different therapist or the mentality of salt and how they intersect. Guest i think anyone that has looked at the randomized Clinical Trials that have been done on the therapies there in kuwait hard to get the research on because it is a constellation of factors and theyve designed to isolate the factors. But they shown the Therapeutic Alliance of being reported occurs. Aa sort of minimize that and they theyve ruled out the therapies they deliberately minimized if the minimize the alliance which to me is hard to see him outside with that but i do think hes a new york blogger and a very smart therapist and he complained of an eecho by other echo by other senior officials i interviewed there is the art of therapy is one of the most important things and like with any art form people say the art of therapy you cant really train for that so if you look at the programs around the United States and you can institutionalize our coming you can institutionalize intangible artistic emotionally sparked their piece. Its not impossible. And in any art form that can be institutionalized in a way so there is a way out and a way to do that. Its to their great credit that has been rolled out the treatment that minimize the artistic side of therapy that the rationale is that they are trying to get as many treatments to as many as possible and they are doing that but i think there needs to be some accounts made for the artistic was tangible less scientifically provable ideas of the art of therapy. You also talk about in the concept of posttraumatic growth. And i was wondering if you could maybe delve into those concepts a little bit more and see if you have any thoughts that they could be linked to the pure counselors peer counselors. Guest my goal was to discuss the epidemiology and the origins of the disease which largely comes from psychiatry and Psychiatric Research but i also wanted to step back as far as i coded and still be on the planet earth and think about it from the question in the range of experiences where does it kind of fit in if there is this structure of human experiences and what i discovered and it fits into the mythology and the pretense because scientific thoughts rather neatly we know how it impacts the brain from science that human beings have known about it and have had opinions for very long time a very long time they just use different names and one of the things that i discovered if you ask the question how our homecomings treated or the aftermath of diseases treated for the heroic journeys treated in the mythology and the larger culture and precinct that culture present the cultures what you discover is that there is a tremendous journey is often the heroic journey as it is discussed by Joseph Campbell and the idea discusses the journey of some people have described as a faith healer or secret politician, someone who goes and is often called to the role by the dramatic experience and by the close call with disease or the close call in the wilderness and so people have survived in the wilderness and has been out allocatedoutin the waist and come back to the mainstream and had come back to the tried and village with the secret knowledge that they had achieved in the altered state and so interestingly thats sort of when you step back and look at the larger history that is one thing that we have exactly reversed in the va today and the medical establishment today. We look at people that are the most sheltered and spent most of their lives in academia and had what i would argue a far lesser knowledge of the universe from personal experience and so they tend to look at things where the trauma and neardeath experiences were looked upon as a mystical perception and growth and there was the idea in this one set of thoughts there is this idea of being traumatized as the mark of a healer which converts as the war veteran is being damaged goods. So i discovered that indicate to the conclusion myself personally that we tend to over emphasize the pathologies of the war experience. One friend of mine told me that he feels the United States has apologized the experience and overemphasized them negative parts of it and we tend to address veterans as damaged goods and there are a number of people and i include myself in the same subset of people that find themselves to be a growth experience and there were certainly negative impacts but i discovered and i interviewed my cousin has been acclaimed who took a fall in 2010 and nearly died and he took that moment as an opportunity to recalibrate his life and in his words to fix somesomethings and his wife that he wanted to change into super him he didnt really dwell on he had nightmares but he didnt really dwell on the idea, he focused on okay i almost died when i was on this ledge. I had these thoughts and i was reflecting on my experience if and i have a better perspective on how i want to live my life now and achieve some of the things of the mounted so as a result he moved to colorado and the start of this Philanthropic Organization and kind of changed the trajectory of his life in many ways and i learned a lot from it. Veterans can learn a lot from that experience. It is the craziest wildest and most extreme out of their experience and what can you dear ive from the continued survival as a perseverance in the face of the long odds. And a lot of the prisoners of war they came away with 60 of the u. S. Air force prisoner of war veterans from the hilton and described it as a positive and even spiritual experience for them so that is a possibility. One of the things when you talk about the survivors and the social bond that they had and also the societal recognition of the experience when they got home, what else can be important for facilitating the resilience recovery tax. Guest it is sort of a unicorn in the research because they have a low diagnosis, one of the lowest ever recorded around 4 which is a fraction of the iraq its very low. And you think about john mccain in prison for five and a half years and in your torture and that is at the extreme end of has ever been measured and yet a lot of those people have very positive experiences. What you discover when you look at the cohort is that those people were older and have had been trained and prepared and many of them had been the course before handhad so there was preparation that had occurred and the Toughest School tends to produce the best soldiers so that is arduous, not abusive but very arduous and pushes people to their limits in reason you tend to have a person that is more prepared for extreme adversity and deployment stressors and trauma and we do find that to be the case. They tend to have a lower diagnosis. People think the reason for that is the training is tougher and so i think i have a very particular view of what helps people but working out and taking the stairs to approach for people can build that resilience because when they examine what causes ptsd it is the concept of surprise were the unknown and seeing something you were not prepared or so it surprises you and you feel hopeless and that feeling of hopelessness of being completely overwhelmed and being completely crushed like a glacier by your environment those are the sort of things that tend to produce trauma so if you can counteract the feeling and get a sense of agency and sense of optimism and control of their environment you reduce the likelihood of ptsd and researchers that interviewed veterans of the hanoi hilton cohort prisoners of war found optimism that is really weird the idea of being optimistic and looking for the upside in your experience is often times what helps build resilience in the long run just the feeling of we are going to make it out of this come all those factors help mitigate. Host im very pleased we have managed to end the discussion on the topic on somewhat of an up note. Thanks again for joining me today. Guest thank you for having me. That was after words booktv Signature Program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, Public Policy makers and others familiar with their material. After words mac airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p. M. On saturday, 12 and 9 p. M. On sunday and 12 a. M. On monday. You can also watch online. Go to booktv. Org and click on after words industries and topics list on the upper right side of the page. Welcome to day number two of the live coverage of the tucson festival of books. Several author panels are a head today. Topics include the Obama Administration immigration concussions in football, politics and natural and manmade disasters. The full schedule of events is available on our website booktv. Org. Now on your screen for gallagher theatre on the campus of the university of arizona, which has been the home of the tucson festival of books. The panel on the Obama Administration will begin shortly. Mark and david marinas are two authors participating and people join us for a callin program. His book is a biography of president obama called barack obama the story. This is booktv live coverage from tucson. Good morning, everybody. Thank you all for coming here today. Thank you all for being part of the festival of books. Really one of americas premier book festivals and one of the really great parts of being in arizona. So appreciate seeing everybody here today. As some of you know, my