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Tough Topics to Discuss

This guide offers resources for topics that may be difficult to discuss. It includes books, ebooks, videos, college resources and community links.

Helpful Resources: 

EBooks available to read online:

Among The Walking Wounded: soldiers, survival and PTSD

Among The Walking Wounded: soldiers, survival and PTSD

Among the Walking Wounded tells one veteran’s experience of PTSD through an intimate personal account, as visceral as it is blunt. In a courageous story of descent and triumph, it tackles the stigma of PTSD head-on and brings an enduring message of struggle and hope for wounded Canadian veterans.

Combat-related Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD : a resource and recovery guide

Combat-related Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD : a resource and recovery guide

As more veterans return from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, more are needing care for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and combat-related traumatic brain injuries (TBI). While there are several treatment and recovery options, outlets for support, and other resources, understanding and gaining access to them is often difficult or confusing. In Combat-Related Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD: A Resource and Recovery Guide, authors Cheryl Lawhorne and Don Philpott offer guidance for returning veterans.

Coping When a Parent Has PTSD

Coping When a Parent Has PTSD

Nearly 8 percent of Americans may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Many are combat veterans or first responders. However, anyone who experiences a traumatic event that caused or threatened serious physical harm, intense fear, helplessness, or horror is at risk. This book examines how PTSD affects individuals and families and empowers youth to cope with the PTSD of a parent. Helping readers recognize the phenomenon, it explores root causes and also provides tools for mitigating the sometimes considerable stress of having a parent with PTSD, including personal and family therapy.

The Compassionate-mind guide to Recovering from Trauma and PTSD : using compassion-focused therapy to overcome flashbacks, shame, guilt, and fear

The Compassionate-mind guide to Recovering from Trauma and PTSD : using compassion-focused therapy to overcome flashbacks, shame, guilt, and fear

This book helps readers reduce the sense of threat they constantly feel and develop a fuller understanding of their reactions to trauma by cultivating compassion for themselves and others. The practical exercises based in compassion-focused therapy (CFT) that are offered in this book help readers gradually confront and overcome trauma-related behaviors. This approach invites readers who have undergone a traumatic experience to develop compassion for themselves and others, a sense of safety, and the ability to self-soothe when difficult memories or emotions arise.

Beyond Post-traumatic Stress : homefront struggles with the wars on terror

Beyond Post-traumatic Stress : homefront struggles with the wars on terror

The authors argue for a new approach to combat stress and trauma, seeing them not just as individual medical pathologies but as fundamentally collective cultural phenomena. Their deep ethnographic research, including unusual access to affected soldiers at Fort Carson, also engaged an extended labyrinth of friends, family, communities, military culture, social services, bureaucracies, the media, and many other layers of society. Through this profound and moving book, they insist that invisible combat injuries are a social challenge demanding collective reconciliation with the post-9/11 wars.

Books available at Evelyn S. Field Library:

Books on post traumatic stress disorder can be found in the library collection upstairs in the section labeled RC552.P67  
PTSD: a short history

PTSD: a short history

In PTSD, Allan V. Horwitz traces the fluctuations in definitions of and responses to traumatic psychic conditions. Arguing that PTSD, perhaps more than any other diagnostic category, is a lens for showing major historical changes in conceptions of mental illness, he surveys the conditions most likely to produce traumas, the results of those traumas, and how to evaluate the claims of trauma victims. 

Wounds of War : how the VA delivers health, healing, and hope to the nation's veterans

Wounds of War : how the VA delivers health, healing, and hope to the nation's veterans

The author spent five years closely observing the VHA's treatment of patients suffering from service related injuries, physical and mental. In this book, she describes how the VHA-tasked with a challenging patient population- does a better job than private sector institutions offering primary and geriatric care, mental health and home care services, and support for patients nearing the end of life.

The Evil Hours : a biography of post-traumatic stress disorder

The Evil Hours : a biography of post-traumatic stress disorder

The author, a war correspondent, former Marine, and PTSD sufferer himself -- has written the essential account of this illness. Through interviews with individuals living with PTSD, forays into the scientific, literary, and cultural history of the illness, and memoir, Morris crafts a moving work that will speak not only to those with the condition and to their loved ones, but also to all of us struggling to make sense of an anxious and uncertain time.

Thank You For Your Service

Thank You For Your Service

This is David Finkel's account from the front lines of Baghdad, he shadowed the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous surge, a grueling fifteen-month tour that changed all of them forever. Now Finkel has followed many of those same men as they've returned home and struggled to reintegrate -- both into their family lives and into American society at large. 

Fields of Combat : understanding PTSD among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan

Fields of Combat : understanding PTSD among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan

In this book the author relates the stories of how American veterans and their families navigate the return home.  Following a group of veterans and their personal stories of war, trauma, and recovery, the author illustrates the devastating impact PTSD can have on veterans and their families, their loved ones, and their communities. He explores issues of substance abuse, failed relationships, domestic violence, and even suicide and also challenges popular ideas of PTSD as incurable and permanently debilitating.

Haunted by Combat : understanding PTSD in war veterans

Haunted by Combat : understanding PTSD in war veterans

The author examines how soldiers returning from combat from World War II to the present have been afflicted with post traumatic stress disorder and explores how treatments have changed over time and what can be done to help soldiers better cope with the horrors of war.