A compounding factor: Non-draft, mercenary economic military: Joined for money.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD):  Force Multiplier (rough draft)

Like pneumonia and cancer, PTSD can have many causes. Like pneumonia and cancer, lifestyle choices can accelerate or worsen PTSD, e.g., smoking for cancer and pneumonia. For many veterans, PTSD is an on-going nightmare while awake or asleep. Therein is a key to understanding how Pentagon choices have fertilized minds and souls for the malignancy of PTSD.

Consider why our dreams become nightmares based on our consciousness. One can look at consciousness as something that is both quantifiable and qualifiable.

  1. In quantity, one can be measured for attention span whence the clinical claim of ADHD--attention deficit, hyperactive disorder. (Oppositely, like this writer, one can suffer from ASD: Attention Surplus Disorder.) Quantitatively, one can associate consciousness with number of thoughts that one can simultaneously process with persons being distinguished between low and high numbers of thoughts. It does not take much consideration to realize that there is a relationship between attention span and quantity of thoughts. This quantification can be called Rate Of Integration, that is, how much information is being integrated per unit of clock time.
  2. Quality of thought can be equated with this quantifiable relationship. For your heart surgery, would you rather have a child playing doctor? Or, a senile alzheimer patient? Or, a board certified blade in his prime? Which would you say had the higher quality or level of thinking?
    1. This comparison shows that the life cycle starts with low levels with a peak, prime level before decline.
    2. This comparison also describes the awake/sleep cycle with biorhythmic subcycles superimposed on the daily ying-yang, i.e., the sleep REM cycle manifests itself as variations in wakeful alertness/drowsiness.

Thus, while sleeping, one has a lower overall level/quality of consciouness quantifiable in lessened attention span and fewer thoughts (per unit of time). Of the latter, would you rather have a person who could think about one or ten things at a time if you needed help in solving a problem? It is like the difference between a person who knows only single syllable words versus a well-stocked vocabulary of understood multi-syllabic descriptors. Thoughts per unit of time can be viewed as density of thought. The more thoughts one is able to simultaneously integrate, the denser ones rate of integration.

While asleep, the reduced number of thoughts opens the door to nightmares as one does not have sufficient conscious capacity to process the reality guideposts that cancel the troubling thoughts. In a sense, one's normal consciousness is like a wide-angle lense that takes in more information or thoughts per minute of time while dreams represent a reduce angle that can only focus on a part of the normal awake reality. Because thoughts free associate, a bad thought triggers a bad thought until the nightmare is raging.

In seeking to optimize troop responsive, the Pentagon initiated a carte blanc use of attention alterring drugs for front-line troops, e.g, modifinil, adderal, ritalin, etc. Thus, when troops are in highly stressful situations, they are processing the events at a higher quantity of thoughts with a longer attention span, i.e., a higher level of consciousness. When returned to their normal state of thinking, active duty or discharged civilian, their recall of those stressful life-threatening events are never complete since they cannot consciously re-collect all of the original thoughts. It is like a squad in a firefight suddenly not knowing where their "I got your back" buddies are. Troops know that a complete squad is tough unit to crack. Incomplete squads crack. And, that is why the Pentagon has force multiplied the demons of PTSD.

Analogies: In reviewing these analogies, apply them to the mind of a veteran who has not only experienced horrible human tragedies but experienced them from a different frame or level of thinking.

  1. Hangover: Whether by Pentagon policy change or personal refusal, the use of combat-related "uppers" should be reduced. Most know that if you drink a lot that you will pay for your drunkeness with head-splitting headache of a hangover. Likewise, people should be aware that experiencing the world from an artificially elevated ROI has its pitfalls, i.e., increased PTSD and suicides.
  2. Visual migraines often includes a reduction in one's peripheral vision.
    1. From a personal, first-time experience in the author's late forties, one thinks one might be dying as one's side vision becomes less and less as one sees only what is in front like looking through a empty toilet tissue roll. Worsening the experience of a visual migraine are the "dancing halos" which one might think are the last embers of one's life fire. (At a cost of almost $3000, the ER doctor said, "Next time just take two aspirins. Now, when the periphery begins to contract, a BC powder packet stops the progression to eyes-on-fire in five minutes. Also, certain foods have been found to consistently trigger the visual migraines, in particular, Arabian Sannee and Mexican Oxahaca coffee.
    2. For soldiers, marines and sailors suffering from PTSD, the onset of a panic attack must (yes, must because of these days and times) be met by applying the best response to any pending problem: Laugh at it ... get a pen, write it down in a diary. When one laughs at a problem, it is solved sooner or is self-disappearing. Why the must? Your country is bankrupt. The helpers are fewer and fewer as they are increasingly under-funded by the corrupt, wasteful habitual politicians. If you cannot pull yourself together to recognize how a lower rate of integration is allowing incomplete memories to become nightmares then you will continue to be your own worst enemy.
    3. From a personal, first-time experience with mental worries. My first-semester visit to the college shrink with my concerns prompted the following: "You are bipolar. If you worry about it, you will fertilize counter-productive attitudes and actions. Make two lists, one for each state of extreme. Laugh about the change when you see it. Make lemonades out of your lemons instead of becoming a suicidal lemming heading for a cliff."
  3. Advice: funds are disappearing ... Man up ... laugh at ... being diagnosed bipolar in college ... it is like asking for a date--no ask, no date, 19 rejections then one date ... Babe Ruth and Tom Edison ... You are on your own.
  4. Periscope
  5. Strings on instrument:
  6. Problems--Definition and Solution. If a problem has six factors and one considers only five then the problem solution is likely to be incomplete. The same is true for a person defining their existence. If a factor is missing then one's sense of self and existence is lacking. In the decline of the Golden Years, many people (this writer included) senses the decline in ablity to juggle as many thoughts or factors that was once possible. For certain problems, an oldster loses the ability to juggle all the thoughts necessary to have a clear picture of the whole problem.
    1. Politicians and hypocrites: Whereas one's capacity declines for weighing all the relevant factors in defining a problem and a solution, politicians and hypocrites with hidden agendas choose to mis-define and mis-solve problems.
    2. A person who takes a capacity elevating drug should not be surprised if he or she is unable to define their self or existence when at their normal state of mind.
  7. Conclusions versus opinions: A conclusion is an answer that all people can arrive at from the same factors or data, e.g., 2+2 = 4, provided they have the intellect to process the intelligence/information. An opinion is different from a conclusion. Intentionally because of a hidden agenda, some might argue an answer that defies the facts because they want an answer other than the objective, logical conclusion. Incompetently because of an insufficient integrity of intellect and intelligence, others will chose an fuzzy answer that they want.Whether from intention or incompetence, want is why opinions are called opinions because the word comes from "opine" and "pine." To pine is to want.
  8. Arguing versus clarifying: ADHD is not an either is or isn't. It is relative based on a continuum form extreme ADHD to extreme ASD (autism). A four-thought person is ADHD relative to a five-thought person. While can be looking for hypocrisy or inconsistency in another person, it is the case that person with a larger thought capacity and attention span will notice inconsistencies in the words or actions of lower capacity thinker. It is simple math. If you only remember what you said a minute ago while your listener remembers your last two minutes, he will detect an inconsistency, a hypocrisy or a lie that you simply cannot detect within your thinking. So, the poor listener is often accused of wanting to argue because it points out something that is obvious and objective to the listener but not make sense to you.
  9. iCube cube of personalities.

This analysis of PTSD is based on the analysis of mentality (consciousness, learning and memory) as the third level of Timism's Periodic Table of Existence, the morality of more time. Particular to this level is iCube: Integrity of Intellect and Intelligence where intellect is the biological process and intelligence is the content that is processed. One can associate this dichotomy with the old nature/nurture divide in describing behavior, that is, an entity's dynamics.

This dichotomy can be viewed as the difference between a record player and the music record. To have good music, one needs both a good player and good records. Either bad player or records or both means bad music. Thus, PTSD sufferers need to realize they cannot play the music that they once could under the influence of "uppers" but they can choose how long they play the bad music of bad memories after the fact.

One's personal integrity of thinking and action is the result of one's intellect and intelligence. By integrity, it is meant quality, consistency and logic. Before one can have moral integrity, one must have integrity at the lower levels of existence: politeness (politics), economics (home management), mentality (learning), catan (catabolism/anabolism of metabolism) and physicality (environment stability). One's personal integrity can be less because one is stupid, naieve, igknowant or dishonest which is a continuum from one cannot learn, one has not learned, one choses not to learn, and one is a hypocrite.

This analysis of consciousness, thinking and behavior observes the three processes that are present in the six levels of existence. They are

This synopsis of timism is provided to encourage the reader to take more seriously how Pentagon choices are metastasizing a long-term cancer for veterans and for the V.A.

icube

Calls for selective memory pill are useless in light of ROI and memes--see 111219 "No Fear: Memory Adjustment Pills Get Pentagon Push"

Also see PTSD 14Mar14