When the War Never Ends

September 15, 2011
Depressing but important, this book spells out the facts about post-traumatic stress disorder by mainly letting its victims and their families tell their stories. Many of the war veterans give up their hobbies and isolate themselves, many turn to alcohol, many take multiple pills (one Vietnam survivor is still on 16 medications), many are paranoid (one Iraq survivor dug foxholes in his garden and built an observation post in a tree in his yard). Marriages suffer. One woman divorced her husband, who oversaw body exchanges of the two sides' dead, because he constantly yelled at her and their kids. Wizelman, a German biologist and PTSD researcher, explains that the condition first appeared in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980 but actually dates back thousands of years. Homer, she says, described the symptoms in the Iliad in 4000 B.C. These moving but almost universally disheartening stories show that treatment can help but is no panacea.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)