When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home:How All of Us Can Help Veterans Audiobook (Free)

Traumatized veterans tend to be diagnosed as suffering from a psychiatric disorder and prescribed a regimen of psychotherapy and psychiatric drugs. But why, asks psychologist Paula J. Caplan in this impassioned reserve, is it a mental disease to be devastated by battle or various other intolerable experiences such as military intimate assault? Exactly what is a emotionally healthy response to loss of life, destruction, and moral horror? In When Johnny and Jane Come Marching House, Caplan argues that the typical treatment of about When Johnny and Jane Arrive Marching House:How Most of us Can Help Veterans therapy and medications is frequently actually harmful. It increases veterans’ burdens by making them believe wrongly that they should have ‘got over it’; it isolates them behind the closed doors from the therapist’s workplace; and it makes them depend on often harmful medications. The numbers of traumatized veterans from past and present wars who continue to suffer demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the strategy. Sending anguished veterans off to talk to therapists, writes Caplan, conveys the message that ordinary people don’t wish to listen-or that we don’t feel certified to listen. Because of this, the truth about war is definitely kept under wraps. The majority of us remain ignorant in what war is really like-and continue steadily to allow our governments to go to war without much protest. Caplan proposes an alternative: that we welcome veterans back to our neighborhoods and pay attention to their stories, one-on-one. (She provides guidelines for conducting these discussions.) This would begin a long overdue national debate about the realities of battle, and it would start the healing process for our coming back veterans.