Qualifier: Former US special operations operator that served in multiple wars.
My anecdotal take is there are many ways that shock and trauma can accumulate through training and war that are far beyond the minimal effects of an M4.
Firearms: While the primary weapons systems are the M4 and side arm (pistol), there are many weapons systems utilized by special operations such as sniper rifles, crew serve weapons, and niche small arms.
The M82 sniper rifle shoots a 50 BMG round. In either the bolt action or semi-auto versions they feel like you are getting punched in the face when you shoot them.
Crew serve weapons like the MK19 and M2 do pack a punch. The MK19 is a machine gun that shoots 40mm grenades. The M2 is a .50 cal machine gun. These weapons systems are mounted, but the percussion of them is still far greater than an M4.
More niche arms like the M249 SAW, M16 HBAR, full-auto AKs, M240 Golf, MP9, etc are not as mild as the standard M4/M16.
Blasts: There are many types of blasts encountered such as Mortars (inbound and outbound), Flash Bangs, Entry charges, IEDs, Landmines, etc. These do make your head ring if you are close enough to them.
In my own personal experience there are many other daily jarring events that aren't nearly as sexy to talk about. Riding in the back of a 5 ton will almost shake your brain out of your head. Riding in an LCAC (hovercraft) is like riding in a 5 ton. Doing boat work in Zodiacs will bounce you all over the place, especially when doing surf passages. Doing hydrographic surveys right where the surf breaks will pound you for hours and make you a little sick afterwards. When your chute opens on a jump, if jumping round chutes, will make you see stars...the landing is not a soft pretty one like rectangle chutes...you hit the ground hard.
There are many more ways your body gets pounded on a daily basis far in excess of the weapons you use.
The article links to a USSOCOM-funded study. In your opinion, are they (as a whole) seriously concerned with mitigating this issue or is it just checking the box? The worry is this can be similar to the buried diesel tank issue contaminating water, which was known for decades but seemed to be ignored (possibly out of liability concerns).
I'm not sure how much of it you can minimize. You can only control what you can control...and war/combat is chaos. Honestly it seems most things in relation to this over the years has been on treatment, not so much prevention.
Thank you for sharing. It's a tragedy that this does not have enough mitigation and follow-up treatment. Armed forces are a necessity, and should not damage a generation beyond repair, and especially not in relative peace.
The tools used, as you’re undoubtedly aware, go far beyond small arms. Family members in the Army have talked about training to clear houses where they want to avoid going through a heavily defended doorway so they put an explosive against a wall, duck around the corner, light it off, pick themselves up, and run through the newly created entryway.
Round chutes (cupolas) are designed to get soldiers from the plane to the ground quickly.
Quickly enough to remain the least possible amount of time in the air where they are an easy target for any ground troop. (This is why soldiers are dropped from very low altitudes; 400m is usual, but some combat drops occurred at even lower altitudes)
But not too quickly that too many of the dropped soldiers end up unable to fight from the hardness of the landing. Please note that it is assumed that some will get hurt on the landing, and the calculus is designed to balance the risk in the air with the risk of the landing.
In contrast, rectangular chutes (wings) are designed to be dropped from higher than 900m, steered in the air, and to provide a very comfortable landing (as long as the surface of the wing is adequate for the suspended weight). They were also introduced for skydiving as a sport, and only later found some military use.
Why is the danger sickening? Of course the equipment is dangerous -- it all exists so you can kill people and not die well beyond any natural level, and there's no such thing as a free lunch.
the article also mentions that they'd all trained extensively in diving deep underwater, which is also known to cause brain damage, but the 'interface astroglial scarring' pathology lab results sound pretty specific to big shock waves
i'm skeptical that firing a rifle produces shock waves that induce cavitation in brain tissue, though
> .50 cal sniper rifles and shoulder launched weapons like Carl Gustaf, the M72 LAW or the AT4 can [produce shock waves that induce cavitation in brain tissue]
The US military, and militaries in general, do not use weapons like the M82/M107 as sniper rifles very often. The M82/M107 in particular has a recoiling barrel (the entire 2.5' barrel slides back when shooting) and isn't a very precise weapon.
They're used for blowing up ordinance or disabling light vehicles. They are sometimes used for hostage situations because they're more likely to immediately disable someone.
The US military has pretty rarely used shoulder fired weapons, since they very rarely have to worry about tanks or aircraft. SEALs in particular wouldn't be doing that.
Generally, you're limited to firing 6 rounds or less per day during training due to blast & shockwave effects. The guys we trained with didn't have that much ammo on hand, anyway, but interesting to know.
Having fired a .50 cal sniper rifle just a couple of times, I was all set. The shock wave from each trigger pull made my nasopharynx hurt. That couldn't have been good.
How much do special forces use weapons significantly more specialized than the standard issue M4? CoD suggests that every operator is slinging a sniper rifle and some highly customized exotic small batch assault rifle; however, I'm guessing that's likely just to make the games more exciting.
What I've heard is they do/did a lot of explosive breaching. Then things like recoilless rifles, heavy machine guns or if you use a .50 caliber sniper rifle might further contribute to the situation.
I'm not sure if these types of units usually dive that deep that you would be worried about brain damage, but I'm less familiar with that side of things. Diving probably hasn't been that much of a focus during the recent years in the middle east either.
FWIW The standard rifles used by the US Military (M16 and it's variants/decedents) are fairly low power, low recoil, and quiet as rifles go. Of course I'm not doctor so maybe they are still enough to cause damage and like another poster pointed out, there are other weapons that soldiers use which are much more powerful.
Mostly agree - I'd like to add that 5.56 seems like a toy until you bring it inside to play, where it's an entirely different story... The first shot feels like someone slamming the switch off on your ears. I wouldn't think this is the cause of brain damage though. IMO the overexposure SEALs have to the modern warfare breach charge is a huge red flag.
The M16 platform has small projectiles, but there’s a lot of powder behind them.
They are pretty loud, more so if you’re to the left or, especially, right where the ejection port sits.
My guess for SEALs is the breaching charges play a big role. Carl Gustafs are notorious as well, but I don't know whether SEALs use them. US Army Special Forces do.
Edit: Yeah, I should clarify to say the M16 is more likely to cause hearing damage, but not brain damage. The concussive force isn't that bad.
If I understood it right, its firing artillery, not rifles. Even then I doubt cavitation, but not shock echos at density borders tearing he tissues at the border.
You state a lot of random things as a fact, while none of them are, not sure why the upvotes.
Other react mostly to guns, but as a diver I can assure you that there is no automatic brain damage from 'diving deep underwater', whatever that layman term means. There are many folks in diving community with 10s of thousand of dives working cognitively as well as their peers. If you mean Nitrox for bigger depths, again that ain't true, Nitrox is actually better than regular compressed air re effects like nitrogen bubbles in your bloodstream.
If you screw up or your equipment fails and end up with decompression sickness thats another story, but its like saying paragliding breaks your legs.
I don't really have a source, but anecdotal evidence... Some of my commercial diver friends got really fucked up after a while of doing it.
One of my friends in particular had a saturation dive go really bad and he came back a completely different person. Like going from someone living the life to a complete wreck in one month.
Famously the Navy SEALs' entry exam-slash-basic training is named "Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL" as a carry-over from its WWII Underwater Demolition Team legacy, maybe GP is referring to that?
There was a rather scathing study on it here. [1] In short the government's own internal investigations realized the obvious answer, a mass hysteria event, was the most likely culprit. But politics got involved and so then they classified reports mentioning this, and released reports suggestive of foreign adversaries attacking people with some mystery weapon, even though their own internal reports put the chances of that at basically zero. So they then set out so study and solve the issue, unsurprisingly finding nothing. The paper's concluding paraph is brutal:
---
Over the course of their 6-year investigation into “Havana Syndrome” U.S. officials expended considerable human capital and financial resources going down a rabbit hole searching for exotic explanations. Instead of finding secret weapons and foreign conspiracies—they found only rabbits. For in the end, prosaic explanations were determined to be the cause of the events in Cuba and its subsequent global spread. That is the lesson of “Havana Syndrome”—follow the science.
Rifles would never do this. They probably usually/always wore ear protection during training. Even if not it wouldn't do it. Many civilians fire guns throughout their lives, often without ear protection.
If you have been firing a whole day, you definitely fell funny in the head.
Ear protecting does not protect brain much. It protects hearing. Brain heals from very mild damage when there is time to rest, but when you shoot all day, day after day, the damage can accumulate. One already recognized problem area is the show wave getting between helmet and skull. It can amplify the impact.
Nobody knows what the impact from very frequent rifle training is. Very people few do that. Once a month in the range is probably not enough.
This was a really well-written article. I think for years I had naturally thought that traumatic brain injury as a result of explosives basically caused the brain to rattle so hard that it smashed against the skull causing contusions, but apparently this is something different.
The way it's explained in the article is that this is actually a result of the blast energy wave bouncing off of differently dense brain tissue sections and causing cavitation.
I'm glad that these issues are finally being brought to light, It's truly unfortunate that no matter how highly trained and skilled some of these soldiers are, that blast waves from IEDs or in this case from their own munitions can result in such insidious physiological changes.
This would also explain why accounts of "shell shock" and PTSD rose so dramatically during WWI but were less common in prior wars where explosions were less common.
That's interesting that at the time, in WW1, it was assumed to be a physical injury to the brain caused by the shockwave of exploding artillery shells (hence the name). A few years later a consensus evolved that it's a psychological problem caused by the stress of combat, which was the prevailing opinion for about 100 years. And now it's looking like it might actually be a physical injury caused by shockwave damage to the brain.
See the first commentator’s George Carlin video on Euphemisms. None of his commentators mention it (yet) but it’s the best part of his comment IMO.
I’ll summarize the video’s transcripts here partially.
In WW1, it was called Shell Shock. That was 70 years ago.
In WW2, a generation later, it was called Battle Fatigue.
In the War in Korea in 1950, it was called Operational Exhaustion.
In the War in Vietnam and because of that war, it has been called Post-Tramatic Stress Disorder.
The NYT Article basically concludes that PTSD has been Shell Shock all along. Progress has been hampered by Euphamisms. If the combat veterans were diagnosed with Shell Shock, we might have a solution or remedy for it 70 years later.
This problem is pretty bad. U.S. soldiers are almost 9x more likely to die by suicide than by combat, according to a Pentagon internal study ending in 2019.
According to data published by the CDC, if you’re a white male (civilian/military/all) the main thing you have to do to live to see your 44th birthday is not die by suicide. The data says that’s a lot harder than it sounds as it’s the second leading cause of death in all age brackets up to age 44. A staggering 70% of all suicides are by white males. What societal factors are disproportionately affecting them?
Maybe put out an ad campaign that says “Suicide is selfish, misandrist, and racist.” Although that doesn’t treat the underlying issue(s) and causational factors. It’s similar to when Foxconn added nets to the upper floors of their iPhone factory.
However also confounded with the rise very different forms of warfare.
Prior to ww1 there were limited periods where you would live on edge - if you have to march armies into position and have pitched battles (e.g. Waterloo) the soldiers have some warning and mental preparation time.
WW1 saw the start of widespread normality of living in trenches and never knowing when the artillery shell might kill you.
I had a friend who had tinnitus from repeated exposure to explosions in the army. To combat his tinnitus he developed the habit of talking incessantly and at home would always have music playing. Sounds kinda funny but I could tell that it was having a significantly negative impact on his life.
From what I’ve heard from people in artillery is that the brass hardly cares about occupational safety. If they need to get rounds down field they get rounds down field first and make sure you have proper ppe for that second. And what ppe they do have is seen as improper. Not much you can even do when the issue is local blast damage and the gun design demands you to be so close to it.
This is the kind of research I've been yearning to see on suicide.
Just telling people not to, or to call a hotline, seemed like the worst most patronizing advice as it never solved the underlying thing.
I've since learned that there is a subset of suicidal people where that's enough, where the suicidal tendency is a kneejerk decision that can be disrupted, but it bugged me that its not serving everyone that becomes suicidal with a recurring condition that's not improved by merely being present.
It always feel like people are too uncomfortable to talk about it enough, or to question the response measures. A "I'm Helping!" sentiment by copy and pasting a suicide hotline memo, when they're not helping at all, just offloading their discomfort into a protective layer for their own psyche.
In contrast, I'm comfortable enough to wonder whether suicide was the most rationale and objectively best choice, as someone with strong self preservation circuits you can see how far apart I am from everyone else. But this is opinion, a hunch, what I really want is a data driven analysis of the conditions. As with real science, I am accepting of any conclusion, instead of trying to conform a conclusion to preventing it if prevention isn't what winds up being on the table with our current infrastructure.
It's important to view suicide not from the "I don't want to live" perspective and rather from the "I don't want to be in pain" viewpoint.
I feel this article does a good job of not explicitly saying this when describing what must have been an agonizing existence for David Metcalf before he took his life.
One way to think about it is via the concept of body autonomy/sovereignty: your life is in your hands. IMHO dignified peaceful suicide should be a right granted to all free individuals. If one is free to live, why is one not free to die?
But that is too radical of an idea, and upsets all sorts of people (especially the money men)
Sometimes opting out is the only rational choice. If there is no support in society for an individual who cannot work and generate profit, if there is no support in society for an individual who is terminally ill (expensive palliative care aside), if there is no support in society for an individual who has "fallen throigh the cracks" (and the cracks are mighty wide), then what is there to do? Slowly die on the street?
This thinking can lead to all kinds of dark paths, such as the state being in charge of the matter (and abusing it, as they can already abuse it via the carceral system), but ultimately we have to confront the fact that as a society we often leave people with no way out, collectively shrug our shoulders, and then act horrified when they take the only viable option that immediately removes all suffering.
People who are uncomfortable with suicide are ultimately uncomfortable with facing the reality that they live in a society that encourages it.
Suicides do not just happen due to being in extreme, incurable pain. People commit suicides due to emotions which seem powerful immediately(failure in love life, academics, career etc.) but would not seem as such a big deal if they were to look back on it afterwards either due to the passing of time or due to finding something else which made life worthwhile.
This also is the problem with the autonomy argument - this is not what the person might themselves would choose if they were in a more sober mood. The autonomy argument is also seen as invalid in other situations like when signing oneself to slavery.
Money men being against suicide for economic reasons runs contrary another other point in your post - money might be saved by the suicide of the invalid and sick. Making suicide legal can easily be abused by powerful state officials incentivizing people to commit suicide for economic or political reasons.
So yes, create a good social support system, but don't encourage suicide.
You say that suicide hotlines are more for the friends of people at risk, than the people at risk, as if it is a bad thing. We as a society generally dont know how to help people who consider suicide for its myriad of causes. We do know how to help their friends though, and pretending that there is help to be had is a big part of it.
A lot of special forces have been doing what we used to call "door kicking" in the last few wars. Lots of explosive breaches, firing weapons and throwing grenades indoors. I'm sure this is the main contributing factor. The percussive force of firing and explosives indoors is horrible and I say this as an ex artillery officer, so I'm used to chest-breaking bangs from firing big artillery guns
As a 13B1O that saw all three sides of this, loading/firing, driver for platoon leader, and while deployed with orders to act in the door-to-door fashion. You are correct. I will add that while operating the gun, the percussive forces are pretty well shielded on the inside of the at least motorized versions, was a paladin crew member here.
Artillery was around for 500 years and shell shock was hugely discussed for past 100 years.
There is much better corellation with divorce. Soldiers returns home with PTSD, only to have their house, children, savings and pension stollen. Because they were not around to guard it! And they may get thrown into prison for being too poor!
Shell shock is very convinient excuse, when victims do not get proper recovery!
From the article, they have objective evidence from studying the brains of deceased servicemembers:
"It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
The lab’s research team started looking for similar damage in other brains. In civilians’ brains, they did not find it. Nor was it in the brains of veterans who had been exposed to a single powerful explosion like a roadside bomb. But in veterans exposed repeatedly to blasts, they found it again and again."
It seems that all that's needed as a counterargument are soldiers with the same set of symptoms that remained married. Additionally, we could compare the divorced who were never exposed to such explosions and see how suicide rates compare.
In other words, data is always a better choice than narratives.
Those words were spoken almost exactly 100 years ago
"Shell shock" is a made up term. Other than on hearing the effects of
high impulse on a human are long-term, complex and still an areas of
research.
In WW1, in Northfields hospital they started to define PTSD in ways
that didn't quite add up. Some soldiers had never been under
bombardment but had the same symptoms.
Nonetheless, the term remained in use because
1) "Shell shock" was deemed curable with rest, and the main objective
was to get soldiers patched up and back to the front.
2) It was a way to avoid getting shot for desertion. A decent officer
would not order traumatised men disciplined but send them on to
hospital with "shell shock".
All the best to you, just wanted to add that it’s interesting that I’ve read similar opinions about the Russian SOF coming from Russian grunts, too, so I guess this is a general feeling among the world’s forces. If it matters I personally am in the grunts’ side, they’re the backbone of any army.
Do you think it's because of whatever brain damage they may have encountered, or because they could not find meaning in their civilian lives? I've read it's often the latter in military men, especially the ones that really believed in the mission and experienced highly stressful life or death situations. They come back and they're taken aback by the mundane bullshit that our lives are in comparison to what they've been through. Intuitively that rings true, but having never served, I can't fully relate.
They don't do anything without $40 billion of air assets circling their position providing cover and get pissy when you tell them they have to shave and can't paint their weapons arbitrary colors.
Also they're all on drugs and will kill you if you report them for embezzling unit funds.
I anectodally heard that some US special forces soldiers joined the Ukraine war, but after a few weeks of getting shelled, being wet and cold and not getting three square meals and a bed to sleep in, they packed up and went home.
Digging into an issue that is affecting lives in such a drastic way and bringing these issues to light.
Like this part of the article for example:
Until The Times told the Navy of the lab’s findings about the SEALs who died by suicide, the Navy had not been informed, the service confirmed in a statement.
A Navy officer close to the SEAL leadership expressed audible shock, and then frustration, when told about the findings by The Times. “That’s the problem,” said the officer, who asked not to be named in order to discuss a sensitive topic. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”
Readit News
My anecdotal take is there are many ways that shock and trauma can accumulate through training and war that are far beyond the minimal effects of an M4.
Firearms: While the primary weapons systems are the M4 and side arm (pistol), there are many weapons systems utilized by special operations such as sniper rifles, crew serve weapons, and niche small arms.
The M82 sniper rifle shoots a 50 BMG round. In either the bolt action or semi-auto versions they feel like you are getting punched in the face when you shoot them.
Crew serve weapons like the MK19 and M2 do pack a punch. The MK19 is a machine gun that shoots 40mm grenades. The M2 is a .50 cal machine gun. These weapons systems are mounted, but the percussion of them is still far greater than an M4.
More niche arms like the M249 SAW, M16 HBAR, full-auto AKs, M240 Golf, MP9, etc are not as mild as the standard M4/M16.
Blasts: There are many types of blasts encountered such as Mortars (inbound and outbound), Flash Bangs, Entry charges, IEDs, Landmines, etc. These do make your head ring if you are close enough to them.
In my own personal experience there are many other daily jarring events that aren't nearly as sexy to talk about. Riding in the back of a 5 ton will almost shake your brain out of your head. Riding in an LCAC (hovercraft) is like riding in a 5 ton. Doing boat work in Zodiacs will bounce you all over the place, especially when doing surf passages. Doing hydrographic surveys right where the surf breaks will pound you for hours and make you a little sick afterwards. When your chute opens on a jump, if jumping round chutes, will make you see stars...the landing is not a soft pretty one like rectangle chutes...you hit the ground hard.
There are many more ways your body gets pounded on a daily basis far in excess of the weapons you use.
Round chutes (cupolas) are designed to get soldiers from the plane to the ground quickly.
Quickly enough to remain the least possible amount of time in the air where they are an easy target for any ground troop. (This is why soldiers are dropped from very low altitudes; 400m is usual, but some combat drops occurred at even lower altitudes) But not too quickly that too many of the dropped soldiers end up unable to fight from the hardness of the landing. Please note that it is assumed that some will get hurt on the landing, and the calculus is designed to balance the risk in the air with the risk of the landing.
In contrast, rectangular chutes (wings) are designed to be dropped from higher than 900m, steered in the air, and to provide a very comfortable landing (as long as the surface of the wing is adequate for the suspended weight). They were also introduced for skydiving as a sport, and only later found some military use.
Ram air parachutes can effectively open in a more gradual manner due to the cellular design.
The special forces tale is heroism - being brave and tough in dangerous situations.
That the danger comes from your own equipment, used as intended, is just sickening.
Dead Comment
that is to say, it's actually shell shock? as in, actual physical shock from actual shells? george carlin would be so proud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
the article also mentions that they'd all trained extensively in diving deep underwater, which is also known to cause brain damage, but the 'interface astroglial scarring' pathology lab results sound pretty specific to big shock waves
i'm skeptical that firing a rifle produces shock waves that induce cavitation in brain tissue, though
Firing a rifle may or may not cause shock waves that are strong enough. If you have been firing a whole day you definitely feel funny in the head.
The US military, and militaries in general, do not use weapons like the M82/M107 as sniper rifles very often. The M82/M107 in particular has a recoiling barrel (the entire 2.5' barrel slides back when shooting) and isn't a very precise weapon.
They're used for blowing up ordinance or disabling light vehicles. They are sometimes used for hostage situations because they're more likely to immediately disable someone.
The US military has pretty rarely used shoulder fired weapons, since they very rarely have to worry about tanks or aircraft. SEALs in particular wouldn't be doing that.
This should really be a big, fat, red flag that something is not quite right..
The CG is LOUD. Wicked backblast on that, too.
Generally, you're limited to firing 6 rounds or less per day during training due to blast & shockwave effects. The guys we trained with didn't have that much ammo on hand, anyway, but interesting to know.
Deleted Comment
I'm not sure if these types of units usually dive that deep that you would be worried about brain damage, but I'm less familiar with that side of things. Diving probably hasn't been that much of a focus during the recent years in the middle east either.
as for diving, it's more about holding your breath for long periods of time repeatedly; look up national apnea teams
They are pretty loud, more so if you’re to the left or, especially, right where the ejection port sits.
My guess for SEALs is the breaching charges play a big role. Carl Gustafs are notorious as well, but I don't know whether SEALs use them. US Army Special Forces do.
Edit: Yeah, I should clarify to say the M16 is more likely to cause hearing damage, but not brain damage. The concussive force isn't that bad.
Other react mostly to guns, but as a diver I can assure you that there is no automatic brain damage from 'diving deep underwater', whatever that layman term means. There are many folks in diving community with 10s of thousand of dives working cognitively as well as their peers. If you mean Nitrox for bigger depths, again that ain't true, Nitrox is actually better than regular compressed air re effects like nitrogen bubbles in your bloodstream.
If you screw up or your equipment fails and end up with decompression sickness thats another story, but its like saying paragliding breaks your legs.
possibly people are upvoting because they know some facts you don't
never heard about that. can you back this up with a source or explanation?
One of my friends in particular had a saturation dive go really bad and he came back a completely different person. Like going from someone living the life to a complete wreck in one month.
---
Over the course of their 6-year investigation into “Havana Syndrome” U.S. officials expended considerable human capital and financial resources going down a rabbit hole searching for exotic explanations. Instead of finding secret weapons and foreign conspiracies—they found only rabbits. For in the end, prosaic explanations were determined to be the cause of the events in Cuba and its subsequent global spread. That is the lesson of “Havana Syndrome”—follow the science.
---
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10913303/
This would take a much bigger explosion.
Ear protecting does not protect brain much. It protects hearing. Brain heals from very mild damage when there is time to rest, but when you shoot all day, day after day, the damage can accumulate. One already recognized problem area is the show wave getting between helmet and skull. It can amplify the impact.
Nobody knows what the impact from very frequent rifle training is. Very people few do that. Once a month in the range is probably not enough.
The way it's explained in the article is that this is actually a result of the blast energy wave bouncing off of differently dense brain tissue sections and causing cavitation.
I'm glad that these issues are finally being brought to light, It's truly unfortunate that no matter how highly trained and skilled some of these soldiers are, that blast waves from IEDs or in this case from their own munitions can result in such insidious physiological changes.
I’ll summarize the video’s transcripts here partially.
In WW1, it was called Shell Shock. That was 70 years ago. In WW2, a generation later, it was called Battle Fatigue. In the War in Korea in 1950, it was called Operational Exhaustion. In the War in Vietnam and because of that war, it has been called Post-Tramatic Stress Disorder.
The NYT Article basically concludes that PTSD has been Shell Shock all along. Progress has been hampered by Euphamisms. If the combat veterans were diagnosed with Shell Shock, we might have a solution or remedy for it 70 years later.
This problem is pretty bad. U.S. soldiers are almost 9x more likely to die by suicide than by combat, according to a Pentagon internal study ending in 2019.
According to data published by the CDC, if you’re a white male (civilian/military/all) the main thing you have to do to live to see your 44th birthday is not die by suicide. The data says that’s a lot harder than it sounds as it’s the second leading cause of death in all age brackets up to age 44. A staggering 70% of all suicides are by white males. What societal factors are disproportionately affecting them?
Maybe put out an ad campaign that says “Suicide is selfish, misandrist, and racist.” Although that doesn’t treat the underlying issue(s) and causational factors. It’s similar to when Foxconn added nets to the upper floors of their iPhone factory.
Prior to ww1 there were limited periods where you would live on edge - if you have to march armies into position and have pitched battles (e.g. Waterloo) the soldiers have some warning and mental preparation time.
WW1 saw the start of widespread normality of living in trenches and never knowing when the artillery shell might kill you.
Just thinking aloud.
Shock damage from firing a gun might be bad, damage from incoming shells is much worse.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/06/14/armys-recruit...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/sports/olympics/bobsled-t...
Just telling people not to, or to call a hotline, seemed like the worst most patronizing advice as it never solved the underlying thing.
I've since learned that there is a subset of suicidal people where that's enough, where the suicidal tendency is a kneejerk decision that can be disrupted, but it bugged me that its not serving everyone that becomes suicidal with a recurring condition that's not improved by merely being present.
It always feel like people are too uncomfortable to talk about it enough, or to question the response measures. A "I'm Helping!" sentiment by copy and pasting a suicide hotline memo, when they're not helping at all, just offloading their discomfort into a protective layer for their own psyche.
In contrast, I'm comfortable enough to wonder whether suicide was the most rationale and objectively best choice, as someone with strong self preservation circuits you can see how far apart I am from everyone else. But this is opinion, a hunch, what I really want is a data driven analysis of the conditions. As with real science, I am accepting of any conclusion, instead of trying to conform a conclusion to preventing it if prevention isn't what winds up being on the table with our current infrastructure.
I feel this article does a good job of not explicitly saying this when describing what must have been an agonizing existence for David Metcalf before he took his life.
Sometimes opting out is the only rational choice. If there is no support in society for an individual who cannot work and generate profit, if there is no support in society for an individual who is terminally ill (expensive palliative care aside), if there is no support in society for an individual who has "fallen throigh the cracks" (and the cracks are mighty wide), then what is there to do? Slowly die on the street?
This thinking can lead to all kinds of dark paths, such as the state being in charge of the matter (and abusing it, as they can already abuse it via the carceral system), but ultimately we have to confront the fact that as a society we often leave people with no way out, collectively shrug our shoulders, and then act horrified when they take the only viable option that immediately removes all suffering.
People who are uncomfortable with suicide are ultimately uncomfortable with facing the reality that they live in a society that encourages it.
This also is the problem with the autonomy argument - this is not what the person might themselves would choose if they were in a more sober mood. The autonomy argument is also seen as invalid in other situations like when signing oneself to slavery.
Money men being against suicide for economic reasons runs contrary another other point in your post - money might be saved by the suicide of the invalid and sick. Making suicide legal can easily be abused by powerful state officials incentivizing people to commit suicide for economic or political reasons.
So yes, create a good social support system, but don't encourage suicide.
It really does seem like projection.
In the US, neighbors will pay for your funeral but not your insulin. Collective disinterest in being confronted with the problem.
For the very simple reasons: it costs money and resources to grow up (and to die), and it’s a life that capitalism could’ve otherwise maybe used.
Artillery was around for 500 years and shell shock was hugely discussed for past 100 years.
There is much better corellation with divorce. Soldiers returns home with PTSD, only to have their house, children, savings and pension stollen. Because they were not around to guard it! And they may get thrown into prison for being too poor!
Shell shock is very convinient excuse, when victims do not get proper recovery!
"It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
The lab’s research team started looking for similar damage in other brains. In civilians’ brains, they did not find it. Nor was it in the brains of veterans who had been exposed to a single powerful explosion like a roadside bomb. But in veterans exposed repeatedly to blasts, they found it again and again."
In other words, data is always a better choice than narratives.
"Shell shock" is a made up term. Other than on hearing the effects of high impulse on a human are long-term, complex and still an areas of research.
In WW1, in Northfields hospital they started to define PTSD in ways that didn't quite add up. Some soldiers had never been under bombardment but had the same symptoms.
Nonetheless, the term remained in use because
1) "Shell shock" was deemed curable with rest, and the main objective was to get soldiers patched up and back to the front.
2) It was a way to avoid getting shot for desertion. A decent officer would not order traumatised men disciplined but send them on to hospital with "shell shock".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock
Encounters with IEDs were common, especially during the surge.
So many of my friends have died to suicide or have killed themselves due to drugs and/or alcohol that it is hard to keep track.
Now that primadonna seals are dying maybe someone will pay attention.
Thankfully the only lasting effects of my deployments seem to be a bad back and distaste for authority.
Why not both?
One of the key challenges with taking care of humans is that we rarely have the luxury of having only a single problem at a time.
I have no idea.
Strangely the most common thread seems to be the ones who off themselves went back home after getting out.
Almost everyone I know who got out and stayed away from home is doing ok. Almost everyone I know who got out and went back home is a wreck.
Some had TBI exposures, some didn't.
Also they're all on drugs and will kill you if you report them for embezzling unit funds.
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Digging into an issue that is affecting lives in such a drastic way and bringing these issues to light.
Like this part of the article for example:
Until The Times told the Navy of the lab’s findings about the SEALs who died by suicide, the Navy had not been informed, the service confirmed in a statement. A Navy officer close to the SEAL leadership expressed audible shock, and then frustration, when told about the findings by The Times. “That’s the problem,” said the officer, who asked not to be named in order to discuss a sensitive topic. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”