Veterans may help us see how we process trauma

Can war veterans repress their traumatic memories of combat, much like many victims of child sexual abuse claim to have done?

Psychologist Bertram Karon, PhD, of Michigan State University, and Michigan psychotherapist Anmarie Widener raised that possibility last year. They wrote about the hundreds of documented cases of World War II veterans who met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These men could not recall traumatic combat experiences that others in their platoon described. Yet their PTSD symptoms subsided once psychologists helped them recall and consciously address the traumatic memories, Karon and Widener wrote in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice (Vol. 28, No. 4, p. 338?340). Such cases, they argued, provide ample evidence that memories can be repressed and become the subliminal cause of PTSD symptoms.

While other psychologists may not agree with that premise, they do believe that elderly veterans are an excellent population with which to study the way people process traumatic memory over the life span. In fact, some say people who have survived heavy military combat may provide better understanding about traumatic memory than will victims of childhood sexual abuse.

'I think the big problem we have with a study of child abuse is we?ve had to rely too heavily on retrospective reports,' says Glen Elder, PhD, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an APA member. 'There?s not enough prospective information on people over time. But in research on men and women who served in the military, we can compare those who we know, through records, were exposed to combat with those who weren?t, and understand the impact of that exposure later in life.'

In fact, Elder and his colleagues have found, through longitudinal data on World War II veterans, that the memories of those soldiers appear to be reliable, something that isn?t always said of sex-abuse victims. They reviewed data from the Grant Study of Adult Development, involving 107 World War II veterans tracked for more than 40 years. In 1946, the men were asked to give detailed information about combat experiences, such as their exposure to enemy fire or whether they killed an enemy soldier. When surveyed again in 1988, the men?s accounts remained largely consistent with their statements 42 years earlier, Elder said.

Still, Elder and Paula Schnurr, PhD, who works at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, say that the study of PTSD in elderly veterans may have some pitfalls. While stories of spontaneous traumatic memories in war veterans may be less politically charged than the cases of allegedly recovered memories of child abuse, researchers still face obstacles in determining the accuracy of those wartime recollections, Schnurr says.

'What happens to people in a war zone isn?t really documented,' Schnurr says. 'Medals and other commendations are sometimes only a proxy?and a crude proxy?for a person?s experience. '

?Scott Sleek