Thomas Bruce

Please read this extraordinarily vulnerable thread about navigating a PhD program with PTSD. Thank you for sharing this, @whyhere4.bsky.social. May you be met with compassion as you reenter your program and may your experiences enrich our understanding of each other and of international relations.

Thank you so much!! I am overwhelmed and deeply appreciate this.

I'm hopeful my writings will raise some awareness of what PTSD is like, specifically for veterans, and reduce the stigmas around it. Things have gotten better in terms of support programs, but there is still so much work to be done. For myself, that work means returning to campus, despite my fears.

I've also yet to set foot back on campus. I'm terrified of seeing colleagues again, of having to explain why I've been gone, or why I have nervous ticks and clutch my water bottle like I think I'll have to use it to fight my way out of a seminar room. I'm terrified they'll think I'm weak.

I struggle every day with this. I'm angry at changing topics and wonder if I threw away opportunities, maybe even my whole career, taking leave like that to treat my PTSD. My negative cognitions just turbocharge this doubt, anger, and self-loathing.

I also had to change topics and form a new committee. This took me further away from the community I thought I had, from the kind of work I thought I would be doing. I already felt isolated enough and faculty really struggle to answer email, if at all sometimes.

It isn't easy returning after you've been gone for so long. They, VAC that is, try their best to prepare you for re-integration, but my department couldn't always be so accommodating. They don't have much experience with people like me, or understanding of my needs.

You realize in those moments that you really need to make changes, however hard they will be. As angry as I was, I extended my leave for another year. Group Therapy is hard, but helps. It helps to know, as much as it is heart wrenching, to discover you are not alone with your PTSD. There are others.

One night, after again researching and weighing the pros/cons of hanging myself vs. intentional drowning, I found a reddit thread by family members of suicide victims. I forced myself to read it. Their grief and confusion over a loved ones death, sometimes written years after, was heartbreaking.

I had numerous setbacks. False plateaus. I thought I could balance therapy and leave with limited work on my PhD early on, until this badly imploded and put me right back to extreme isolation and looking for anchor points around my apartment.

Therapy is hard. Processing trauma, when you've built up so many ways to avoid any and all external and internal reminders of the events over decades, is hard. You have to keep showing up every week. You have to work on it, like selflessness in Buddhism, every bloody day.

Even then, I wasn't out of the woods. Getting the diagnosis is one thing, gradually accepting it is quite another. Realizing how these schema affected my behaviors the way they did and for so long, given how young I was when this happened on deployment, is a lot.

I constantly wish I never got this diagnosis, that I could continue to live in ignorance with my ever worsening coping schema, but the reality is untreated PTSD or Operational Stress Injuries will eventually kill you. I would have been dead three years ago if I hadn't sought help.

This in turn leads to further shame, problematic enough when you already think you're weak for admitting you need help, or have shame linked to the traumatic event(s). It feeds the isolating tendencies, the harmful coping schema you've built up, and fuels suicidal ideation.

I think this is also true of the extreme negative cognitions. People just don't want to be around you. The emotional swings can be frightening enough. The constant negativity, the fixation on certain grievances, the perpetual anger that blocks processing the trauma, it is a lot.

For colleagues, friends, and especially family, I think they could simply not understand why they no longer saw me on campus, heard from me, or why I zealously avoided any and all social occasions. I think these could be easily mistaken for being rude, selfish, or just plain weird.

White School, Black Memories White School, Black Memories: Barnes, CWO John G.: 9781990644276: Books - Amazon.ca

Though I've not yet read all of his book, his and Doucette's descriptions of extreme isolation, avoidance of friends and family, volatile emotional swings, horrific nightmares, and even suicidal ideation, accurately describe PTSD.
www.amazon.ca/White-School...

So does CWO John G. Barnes in his interview with the Canadian War Museum. Particularly the career killing aspects of a PTSD diagnosis, the deeply entrenched organizational norms against showing weakness. These are also deeply internalized at a personal level.
www.warmuseum.ca/collections/...

Better Off Dead: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Canadian Armed Forces Better Off Dead: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Canadian Armed Forces: Doucette, Fred: 9781771083546: Books - Amazon.ca

Until very recently I was not aware of just how entrenched this stigma was within the CAF itself. There is a tendency to think "I was the problem, I was the weak one, I deserved to be ostracized." Doucette captures some of these attitudes well.
www.amazon.ca/Better-Off-D...

Stigmas around mental health endure in Canadian society more broadly, but to my surprise also within academia. With respect to PTSD, I think a lack of awareness is partly to blame for this. We and by that I mean veterans specifically, do not like to talk about PTSD .

Over a year ago I returned from an extended leave from my PhD program. I wish I could say the return has been easy. It hasn't been. In an effort to try and reduce the stigma around mental health and specifically PTSD, I'll try to explain some of the reasons why.

My recent publications on the topic (2/2): doi.org/10.1017/gov....