A view of PTSD prepared for Dr. Price, McGuire V.A., Richmond, VA (140313)
When one understands the basic three processes/dynamics of all entities in existence as "rates of integration" then one sees how the different levels of existence are cut from the same jigsaw pattern with different surface veneers obscuring the commonality. Thus, one can see how the following are self-similar
My frustration at the V.A. of the last few months derives from lacking the anti-narcoleptic (a CNS stimulant) to think more fully. The lack has me trying to solve the complex problems of my work without the ability to juggle the same number of issues that composed those problems when first delineated. I know the problems in general but as I try to concentrate on them, my lower "rate of integration" is like a "Whack a mole" mentality: Focusing on one of the needed thoughts causes another to disappear from the mental picture. It is a mental Sisyphus--as one is about to get the picture it changes. It is a frustrating series of awakening amorous without results.
The aforementioned paradigm is akin to the mental trauma of nightmares and of veterans. In combat hyped up by stimulants, they experience the frontline reality at an elevated rate of integrating information. After returning, they cannot re-construct the full experience because they can recall only a few parts at anyone time. It is like a nightmare in which we traipse from one bad thought to another because we don't have the reality guideposts to which we chain our consciousness. Our memories keeps slipping or "whacking" away.
This different rate of information integration with an increased nightmarish consciousness is why some SSRI (paxil, zoloft, zoloft) patients commit suicide. If one is depressed because of a depressing world and one is a caring individual, lowering one's rate of integration is a prescription for depression to be compounded by a sense of not being as competent as one once was. In a sense, some SSRI patient are like the geriatric aware of the dementia onset that drives their loss of control into suicidal thoughts and results. For both, the distinguishing variable is how they take life more seriously than the opposite, the mass of "Let's party. I'm not worried by my problems anymore."
If you think this is all poppycock, I apologize for wasting your time. However, my 1970 ROI theory became 1976 Timism as its principles were applied to other levels of existence. My analysis of climate change from rising CO2 has a lot to do with ROI. One of my self-confirming "I'm right" milestones was when I discovered the physicist/mathematicians Fourier work in climate. I used his transformations [3&9 dimension calculus, a must for nuclear physics and quantum mechanics] in my early climate change investigations. In 1824, he said that the industrial revolution fueled by fossil fuels would lead to a "greenhouse effect." Thus, I encourage to you view consciousness or mentality as a pattern of clouds. If you study clouds you see they have personalities that evolve and change with a cross-reference to many personality, cognitive and cortical traits: highs, lows, depressions, etc. Have you noticed the videos of cortical neuro activity are akin to clouds moving at an accelerated rate. This is more than poetry because of the organic property of CO2 which exerts a fission/fusion process in the atmosphere.
If I am wrong, I am really one dingbat. If not, I have been lucky to fuse different sciences into a single paradigm that explains every logical truth worth knowing. But as one engineer said after spending a couple of days reading timism on the Canadian from Toronto to Vancouver, "Each part is true, but I can't believe the whole."
With the US economy on deathrow and no apparent commutation of sentence, I feel sorry for vets suffering PTSD because funding will not only be vanishing but it will be misspent. I think if they understand the above ROI explanation and heard what the college shrink told me my first semester, they would laugh off the troubling thoughts rather than plant the seeds of nightmarish weeds of hell. It would save the V.A. a lot of money if vets learned when they should laugh at themselves rather than worry about themselves. As my shrink said, if you worry about it, you will go from being the normal neurotic into a troubled psychotic. In general, if one learns to laugh at one's problems, one solves them quicker.
Also see PTSD: Force Multiplier