From Wisdom 2.0 2019 in San Francisco.
16:35 min
CLEAR ALL
War and PTSD are on the public’s mind as news stories regularly describe insurgency attacks in Iraq and paint grim portraits of the lives of returning soldiers afflicted with PTSD.
PTSD is an extremely debilitating condition that can occur after exposure to a terrifying event.
A top expert on human trauma argues that we vastly overestimate how common PTSD is and fail to recognize how resilient people really are. After 9/11, mental health professionals flocked to New York to handle what everyone assumed would be a flood of trauma cases. Oddly, the flood never came.
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People who experience trauma often struggle with its effects, but many men and women have found meaning in their traumatic event and now experience life differently.
This is a journey of finding beauty within darkness. Former Army Major Josh Mantz reaches into the deepest corners of the human soul to expose the most difficult emotions associated with traumatic experiences.
In 2010 the Department of Veterans Affairs cited 171,423 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans diagnosed with PTSD, out of 593,634 total patients treated. That’s almost 30 percent; other statistics show 35 percent. Nor, of course, is PTSD limited to the military.
A pioneering researcher gives us a new understanding of stress and trauma, as well as the tools to heal and thrive. Stress is our internal response to an experience that our brain perceives as threatening or challenging.
I’ve done a little bit of work with soldiers returning from Iraq and have worked with domestic violence shelter workers on issues of vicarious trauma.
In his role as the founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM), Dr. Gordon has created and implemented what may well be the world’s largest and most effective program for healing population-wide psychological trauma.