Gordon wrote on Apr 26
th, 2017 at 9:38am:
I saw a doco that suggest special forces have lower rates of PTSD despite being in higher stress situations.
Probably due to better training and higher quality people.
Partially, but an interesting finding about PTSD is that those who are more in control of their fate are much less likely to suffer from it. That is, those with greater autonomy, such as higher ranks and special forces.
The low-level grunts who have to do as theyre told, sit around base sweeping the floors and twiddling their thumbs, waiting for death to come aren't in control of their fate, and they are the ones who get struck.
Quote:Soldiers have profoundly little control on their environment and this is a fact made nakedly apparent to them every single day they are down range (and many they are not). Here are two passages from Sebastian Junger's War that evince this:
The Navy study compared stress levels of the pilots [who have to land on tiny aircraft carrier landing strips] to that of their radar intercept officers, who sat immediately behind them but had no control over the two-man aircraft. The experiment involved taking [cortisol] samples of both men on no-mission days as well as immediately after carrier landings... Radar intercept officers lived day-to-day with higher levels of stress -- possibly due to the fact that their fate was in someone else's hands -- but on mission days the pilots' stress levels were far higher. The huge responsibility borne by the pilots gave them an ease of mind on their days off that they paid for when actually landing the plane.
The study was duplicated in 1966 with a twelve-man Special Forces team in an isolated camp near the Cambodian border in South Vietnam... There was a serious possibility that the base would be overrun, in which case it was generally accepted that it would be "every man for himself." The two officers saw their cortisol levels climb steadily until the day of the expected attack and then diminish as it failed to materialize. Among the enlisted men, however, the stress levels were exactly the opposite: their cortisol levels dropped as the attack drew near, and then started to rise when it became clear that they weren't going to get hit... "The members of this Special Forces team demonstrated an overwhelming emphasis on self-reliance, often to the point of omnipotence," they wrote. "These subjects were action-oriented individuals who characteristically spent little time in introspection. Their response to any environmental threat was to engage in a furor of activity which rapidly dissipated the developing tension."
Specifically, the men strung C-wire and laid additional mines around the perimeter of the base. It was something they knew how to do and were good at, and the very act of doing it calmed their nerves. In a way that few civilians could understand, they were more at ease facing a known threat than languishing in the tropical heat facing an unknown one.
Quote:One of the most puzzling things about fear is that it is only loosely related to the level of danger. During World War II, several airborne units that experienced some of the fiercest fighting of the war also reported some of the lowest psychiatric casualty rates in the U.S. military. Combat units typically suffer one psychiatric casualty for every physical one, and during Israel's Yom Kippur War of 1973, frontline casualty rates were roughly consistent with that ratio. But Israeli logistics units, which were subject to far less danger, suffered three psychiatric cases for every physical one. And even frontline troops showed enormous variation in their rate of psychological breakdown. Because many Israeli officers literally led from the front, they were four times more likely to be killed or wounded than their men were -- and yet they suffered one-fifth the rate of psychological collapse. The primary factor determining breakdown in combat does not appear to be the objective level of danger so much as the feeling -- even the illusion -- of control. Highly trained men in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances are less likely to break down than untrained men in little danger.
The division between those who feel in control of their fate and those who don't can occur even within the same close-knit group. During World War II, British and American bomber crews experienced casualty rates as high as 70 percent over the course of their tour; they effectively flew missions until they were killed. On those planes, pilots reported experiencing less fear than their turret gunners, who were crucial to operations but had no direct control over the aircraft. Fighter pilots, who suffered casualty rates almost as high as bomber crews, nevertheless reported extremely low levels of fear. They were both highly trained and entirely in control of their own fate, and that allowed them to ignore the statistical reality that they had only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving their tour.