Military Mental Health

Whether serving in the Special Forces, rowing oceans or investigating some of the world’s most notorious drug cartels, Jason Fox has overcome more than his fair share of emotional and mental conflicts. Now, he shares the tools he’s developed at the cutting edge of an elite military career and shows how you, too, can build the resilience and inner strength to overcome whatever challenges life puts in front of you.

Imagine a world without natural light, where you can barely stand up straight for fear of knocking your head, where you have no idea of where in the world you are or what time of day it is, where you sleep in a coffin-size bunk and sometimes eat a full roast for breakfast. Now imagine sharing that world with 140 other sweaty bodies, crammed into a 430ft x 33ft steel tube, 300ft underwater, for up to 90 days at a time, with no possibility of escape.

The vivid and emotional story of one soldier's heroic struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder.1944: Norm Bussel, an introspective and happy-go-lucky teen from Memphis, finds himself bailing out of a burning B-17 bomber just months after his 19th birthday. Touching-down in a field outside Berlin, Norm was immediately seized by local farmhands, who were in the process of lynching him when a passing German soldier put a stop to the execution.

In 1987, Angela Findlay walked into a prison and instantly but inexplicably felt at home. For years she had wrestled with a sense of 'badness' within her. But working with prisoners was just the beginning of her search for answers that took her to Nazi Germany and the life of her dead grandfather, who, it emerged, was a decorated general on the Eastern front. In a rare confluence of memoir, psychology and historical detective story, this is Findlay's account of her unflinching quest for the truth about her German family.

Soldiers Don't Go Mad tells for the first time the story of the soldiers and doctors who struggled with the effects of industrial warfare on the psyche. As he investigates the roots of what we now know as PTSD, Charles Glass brings historical bearing to how we must consider war's ravaging effects on mental health, and the ways in which creative work helps us come to terms with even the darkest of times.

Suicide rates among Army soldiers increased 80 percent between 2004 and 2008, according to a recent report published in Injury Prevention. In the last several years, the number of soldiers returning from the Middle East with mental and physical wounds has continued to climb. According to Dr. Simon Rego, a supervising psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center, "Unlike any other time in history, U.S. military suicide rates now appear to have surpassed those among comparable civilian populations. It is therefore critical that we address this emerging public-health problem."

The town of Wirrawee is emerging from war, slowly, like a flower after a cold snap. Businesses are starting to reopen, the school has re-commenced classes, and local farmers are gradually repossessing their land. But it's not the same Australia as before the war. A new nation exists just a few miles away, a new border that separates Australia from its invaders. Or does it?

For 30 years, Hamish has served and volunteered in conflict zones around the world. As the army's foremost chemical weapons expert, he built a unique first-hand understanding of how to prevent attacks and train doctors on the frontline - saving countless lives in the process. After suffering near-death experiences time and again, Hamish discovered he had a ticking time bomb in his own chest: a heart condition called sudden death syndrome that could kill him at any time. But with a new awareness for the fragility of life, he fought harder to make his count.

Paralysis. Stuttering. The shakes. Inability to stand or walk. Temporary blindness or deafness. When strange symptoms like these began appearing in men at casualty clearing stations in 1915, a debate began in army and medical circles as to what it was, what had caused it and what could be done to cure it. But the numbers were never large. Then, in July 1916, with the start of the Somme battle, the incidence of shell shock rocketed.

One bright spring morning in the woods of France, a soldier, blinded by the war, is found by a little girl named Coco, and her older sister Marcelle. In return for their kindness, the soldier tells the sisters marvelous tales, each story connected to the keepsake he carries in his pocket: a perfect, tiny, silver donkey.

Marine Sgt. John Peck survived an IED during the War on Terror that left him with a traumatic brain injury, amnesia, and cost him his marriage. He survived another three years later, one that left him with three and a half limbs missing. He’s one of only two living people to survive the flesh-eating fungus he contracted in recovery at Walter Reed, one that left him as a quadruple amputee. And that’s only the beginning of his story. What followed was a recovery nothing short of miraculous.

One of the last major stories on the Third Reich that remains largely untold is that of the extraordinary wave of suicides, carried out not just by much of the Nazi leadership, but by thousands of ordinary Germans, in the Second World War's closing period. Some of these were provoked by terror in the face of advancing Soviet troops or by personal guilt, but many could not be explained in such relatively straightforward terms.

A tense true-crime story about an all-American soldier boy turned bank robber. Alex Blum was a clean-cut all-American kid with one unshakeable goal in life: to serve his country in the military. He was accepted into the elite Rangers regiment, but on the first day of his leave before deployment to Iraq, Alex got into his car with two fellow soldiers and two strangers, drove to a local bank in Tacoma and committed armed robbery. The Blum family was devastated and mystified. How could he have done such a thing?

Five soldiers injured in the same 2009 bomb blast are a case study in a new epidemic among America's troops, who are grappling with a combination of concussion and post-traumatic stress disorder.

A unique joint memoir by a US marine and a conflict photographer whose unlikely friendship helped both heal their war-wounded bodies and souls.

For the first time, Army Ranger hero Nate Self tells his story. Self recounts the Roberts Ridge Rescue mission, the ferocious battles in Afghanistan, and the lone war of attrition that Nate Self has waged against post-traumatic stress disorder. This audio will become a go-to work for understanding the long-term effects of the war on terror. Thousands of families are fighting this battle, and Nate Self opens up his whole life - tragedies, successes, failures, and a struggle with suicidal thoughts - to share the facts.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a tremendous toll on the mental health of our troops. In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama took to the Senate floor to tell his colleagues that "many of our injured soldiers are returning from Iraq with traumatic brain injury", which doctors were calling the "signature wound" of the Iraq War. Alarming stories of veterans taking their own lives raised a host of vital questions: For instance, why hadn't the military been better prepared to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI)?

Are demons real? Do ghosts exist? Do some unresolved medical and mental health issues have a spiritual connection? In When Demons Surface, former senior military chaplain Steve Dabbs answers those questions and more. Exploring more than fifty true stories of supernatural encounters from pastoral and personal experiences as well as historical research, this book is scholarly yet simple, hair-raising and enlightening.

Most Americans are now familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its prevalence among troops. In this groundbreaking new audiobook, David Wood examines the far more pervasive yet less understood experience of those we send to war: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in the impossible moral dilemmas of modern conflict.

The hallmarks of America’s War on Terror have been repeated long deployments and a high percentage of troops returning with psychological problems. Family members of combat veterans are at a higher risk of potentially lethal domestic violence than almost any other demographic; it’s estimated that one in four children of active-duty service members has symptoms of depression; and nearly one million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan require increased care due to physical or psychological trauma.