Fifteen Percent-Off Friday: November

Happy Friday! In honor of both the "Friday Reads" phenomenon and the first Friday of the month, we're excited to offer a 15 percent discount on When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans by Paula J. Caplan to our blog readers (when purchased through The MIT Press website). Follow this link, which will automatically apply the discount, to get your copy of the book just in time for Veterans Day. *In the (unlikely) event that the discount doesn't appear when you click the link, have no fear--simply manually enter the discount code "caplanpu11" in the shopping cart to get the discount.*

Here's an excerpt from When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home to kick off our first Fifteen Percent-Off Friday. Check back on the first Friday of December (12/2) for our next "Fifteen Percent-Off Friday" pick.

 

It is not surprising that the psychiatrized nature of our culture makes so many nontherapists feel they are out of their league when trying to help people who have been through as much horror as war veterans have. It is true that not every nontherapist, like not every therapist, can help every vet, and some nontherapists, like some therapists, will make mistakes. No approach is free from risk, because all involve interactions between two flawed (because human) beings. But if we consider the pros and cons of outreach from community compared to those of psychotherapy with someone who is regarded as an expert and with psychotrophic drug treatment, perhaps the risks of the first seem not quiet so serious…

There are several ways in which a nontherapist can convey messages that make a difference to vets in a way that therapists cannot. First, some therapists might try to erase the power differential that exists between themselves and their veteran patients because the former are therapists and thus assumed to know more about patients than they know about themselves, to have all the answers. But between a layperson and a vet, this particular power differential does not even rear its head. Laypeople are not being paid to listen to the vet, they do not come from a training program in which they learned certain interpretations of people’s experiences, and are not expected to have all the answers. This can create a more comfortable setting in which the listener and vet can interact. When a nontherapist listener clearly respects and tries to understand what a veteran says, the vet does not have to wonder what professional framework of interpretation might be getting in the way. (This is not to say that all therapists are dogmatic, of course.) Related to this, it is widely known that a major activity of therapists is to assign psychiatric labels to people and to treat as illness anything other than serenity and happiness. Although vets might be concerned that laypeople have absorbed these activities from the broader psychiatrized culture, they at least know that nontherapists do not have a professional stake in pathologizing them. So many vets have told me that the best thing anyone has ever done for them is to say something along the lines of, “If I had been through what you just described that you went through, I would be feeling the same way you are. I don’t think you’re crazy. In fact, if you hadn’t been this upset, I would have wondered why ’ ”36(177).

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36  S. Shane, “A Flood of Troubled Soldiers Is in the Offing, Experts Predict” (New York Times, December 16, 2004), writes that Dr. Thomas Burke, an Army psychiatrist, believes that if vets are told they are not crazy, they often get better rapidly.