The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

by David J. Morris

Overview

“An essential book” on PTSD, an all-too-common condition in both military veterans and civilians (The New York Times Book Review).
 
Post-traumatic stress disorder afflicts as many as 30 percent of those who have experienced twenty-first-century combat—but it is not confined to soldiers. Countless ordinary Americans also suffer from PTSD, following incidences of abuse, crime, natural disasters, accidents, or other trauma—yet in many cases their symptoms are still shrouded in mystery, secrecy, and shame.
 
This “compulsively readable” study takes an in-depth look at the subject (Los Angeles Times). Written by a war correspondent and former Marine with firsthand experience of this disorder, and drawing on interviews with individuals living with PTSD, it forays into the scientific, literary, and cultural history of the illness. Using a rich blend of reporting and memoir, The Evil Hours is 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.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544084490
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

David J. Morris is a former Marine infantry officer and war correspondent. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Daily Beast, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. In 2008, he was awarded a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue: The Warning
 
Have you ever been blown up before, sir?
Everything was fine until it wasn’t.
Apophenia: finding patterns where there shouldn’t be patterns
 
These were the words I wrote in my journal on October 9, 2007, the day before I was almost killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad. The last line I wrote in the days afterward. Later, I went back and underlined it in a different colored ink, as if to emphasize that I had come back to it in a different state of mind. As if I were leaving a clue for some future version of myself.
    I was in Iraq for my third reporting trip and had gone out on a patrol with some soldiers from the First Infantry Division into Saydia, a neighborhood that seemed, at least on the surface, to be relatively peaceful. On our way back inside the wire, one of the soldiers asked nonchalantly if I’d ever been blown up before. I considered the question for a moment, and then, as the silence deepened, I sensed that something was amiss. The words came awkwardly as I explained that while I had spent the summer before in Ramadi, at that point the deadliest city in Iraq, I was still a virgin in that particular area.
    It was like my fate had been spoken: I had never been blown up before, but everyone in the Humvee knew that was about to change.
    According to the laws of grunt superstition, I was the injured party, but somehow I managed to feel bad for the kid who’d asked the question. As it happened, the soldiers in the Humvee were from all over Latin America — Peru, Mexico, Guatemala — and they began pummeling him in a variety of languages and accents for what he’d done.
    At the time, I felt embarrassed more than anything else and just wanted the moment to end. I didn’t like being the topic of conversation, and it took everything I had to avoid thinking about being blown into tiny red pieces. This, in fact, was one of the first head tricks I’d learned in Iraq, to systematically ignore the obvious: you were always just about to die — get over it. I was wasted, too, and my mind wasn’t right. I had been in Iraq for a total of nine months by this point, and even though I had seen people killed by roadside bombs, I’d never been hit myself, and somehow I’d come to feel that I had my luck under control. But in posing the question, it was as if the soldier had stolen that control, thrown me over to the forces of chance that I had worked so hard to insulate myself from.
    Later, I interviewed a prominent psychoanalyst, who told me that trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time, you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again. August is June, June is December. What time is it? Guess again. In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.
    Another odd feature of traumatic time is that it doesn’t just destroy the flow of the present into the future, it corrodes everything that came before, eating at moments and people from your previous life, until you can’t remember why any of them mattered.
    What I previously found inconceivable is now inescapable: I have been blown up so many times in my mind that it is impossible to imagine a version of myself that has not been blown up. The man on the other side of the soldier’s question is not me. In fact, he never existed.
    The war is gone now, but the event remains, the happening that nearly erased the life to come and thus erased the life that came before. The soldier’s question hangs in the air the way it always has. The way it always will.
Have you ever been blown up before, sir?
 
Introduction
 
Over the past four decades, post-traumatic stress disorder has permeated every corner of our culture. A condition that went unacknowledged for millennia, and began its public life with a handful of disgruntled Vietnam veterans “rapping” in the offices of an antiwar group in midtown Manhattan in December 1970, has spread to every nation on the globe, becoming in the words of one medical anthropologist a kind of “psychiatric Esperanto.” A species of pain that went unnamed for most of human history, PTSD is now the fourth most common psychiatric disorder in the United States. According to the latest estimates, nearly 8 percent of all Americans — twenty-eight million people — will suffer from post-traumatic stress at some point in their lives. According to the Veterans Administration, which spends more annually on PTSD research and treatment than any organization in the world, PTSD is the number one health concern of American military veterans, regardless of when they served. In 2012, the federal government spent three billion dollars on PTSD treatment for veterans, a figure that doesn’t include the billions in PTSD disability payments made every year to former servicemembers.
    Since the attacks of 9/11, when public awareness of the disorder gained momentum, PTSD (a condition characterized by hyperarousal, emotional numbness, and recurring flashbacks) has, to the dismay of some international aid experts, supplanted hunger as the primary Western public health concern when a war or other humanitarian crisis hits the news. PTSD is one of the newest major psychiatric disorders to be recognized, and yet today it has entered the public lexicon to the degree that it is not uncommon to hear journalists describing entire countries as being stricken with it and writing lengthy articles debating whether or not Batman might be suffering from it. Consumers who are so inclined can now go online and purchase a commemorative patch for $5.99 that reads P.T.S.D.: NOT ALL WOUNDS ARE VISIBLE. As any trauma researcher will tell you, PTSD is everywhere today.
    And yet, like many mental health disorders, there is broad disagreement about what exactly PTSD is, who gets it, and how best to treat it. There remains a small but vocal cadre of researchers who argue that PTSD is a social fiction, a relic of the Vietnam War era foisted upon the global community by well-meaning but misguided clinicians, and that by, in essence, encouraging people to be traumatized, we undermine their recovery. A condition born of strife, PTSD is dominated by conflict in its scientific life as well. There is, however, little disagreement that survivors of rape, war, natural disasters, and torture — the events that are generally recognized to lead to PTSD — experience profound, even existential, pain in the aftermath of such events. This brand of suffering has become so widely recognized that it has in fact permanently altered the moral compass of the Western world and changed our understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to feel pain.
    Pierre Janet, a French neurologist writing in 1925, observed that emotional reactions to traumatic events can be so intense as to “have a disintegrating effect on the entire psychological system.” This book is about that effect and what it looks and feels like from the inside. Over time, PTSD has changed not only the way humans understand loss but also how humans understand themselves generally; I am interested in it both as a mental condition and as a metaphor. How people respond to horrific events has always been determined by a complex web of social, political, and technological forces. For most of human history, interpreting trauma has been the preserve of artists, poets, and shamans. The ways in which a nation deals with trauma are as revealing as its politics and language. The ancient Greeks staged plays that were written and performed by war veterans as a communal method for achieving catharsis. Today, for better or worse, we deal with trauma and horror almost exclusively through a complex, seemingly arbitrary cluster of symptoms known as post-traumatic stress disorder. In the classical world, the ancients in the wake of trauma might look for answers in epic poetry, such as The Iliad or The Odyssey. Today, we turn to the most current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This fact alone is worthy of further exploration: most of us no longer turn to poetry, our families, or the clergy for solace post-horror. Instead, we turn to psychiatrists. This is, historically speaking, an unusual state of affairs.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Warning xi

Introduction 1

1 Saydia 21

2 In Terror's Shadow 41

3 Toward a Genealogy of Trauma 60

4 The Haunted Mind 103

5 Modern Trauma 132

6 Therapy 166

7 Drugs 213

8 Alternatives 231

9 Growth 252

Epilogue: Counterfactuals 268

Acknowledgments 273

Notes 274

Selected Bibliography 317

Index 328

Editorial Reviews

…a provocative, exhaustively researched and deeply moving analysis of traumatic memory and how we make sense of it…it's Morris's personal experience of Iraq and its aftermath that lends The Evil Hours its impressive essayistic quality—setting it apart from other clinical literature on the topic and making the book compulsively readable. The narrative is driven by a constant authorial intelligence and a genuine curiosity. We can see Morris's mind working through questions on the page—and this is a great pleasure because it invites the reader to do the same…The Evil Hours is an essential book not just for those who have experienced trauma, but for anyone who wants to understand post-9/11 America. Reading it will make you a better and more humane citizen.

The New York Times Book Review - Jennifer Percy

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

"THE EVIL HOURS is a provocative, exhaustively researched and deeply moving analysis of traumatic memory and how we make sense of it…an essential book not just for those who have experienced trauma, but for anyone who wants to understand post-9/11 America. Reading it will make you a better and more humane citizen." —New York Times Book Review

"The Evil Hours, by David Morris—at once a patient and fine writer—conveys the mysteries of trauma in a way that is unsurpassed in the literature...this is the most important book on the subject to come out in this century." —Times Literary Supplement

“A lucid etiology … Well-integrated autobiographical elements make this remarkable work highly instructive and readable.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED Review
 
“An exploration of the enduring human cost of war...An eye-opening investigation of war's casualties.”—Kirkus
 
“Morris brings not just experience but insight to a topic of grave relevance...The takeaway is a durable resource for both those with PTSD and their loved ones.” —Donna Chavez, Booklist
 
“Even today, the ‘PTSD’ label is often misunderstood and misapplied, with the average reader seeing it as something that only affects veterans and rape victims (which is decidedly not the case). What a relief, then, to have Morris’ stunning writing and thorough research to make sense of it. As a former Marine, Morris writes vividly about life during and after war; and he also turns his eye towards the trauma that can arise from other categories including sexual assault and near-death experiences.” —Flavorwire 

“The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is an engaging exploration of, and a timely resource on, the affliction first known in modern times as shell shock. David J. Morris, a former Marine who covered the Iraq war until he was involved in an explosion, uses his own experiences, literary accounts of war, and interviews with veterans, rape survivors and psychiatrists to weave a fascinating and well-researched narrative about psychological trauma and the American treatment of it.” —Chicago Tribune

“Morris has found himself in a position to help us think about PTSD with much more complexity than we’re accustomed to, and in so doing The Evil Hours takes an important and timely place in our culture.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“David Morris, a war journalist and former Marine officer, delivers a compassionate, approachable examination of post-traumatic stress in The Evil Hours…It is a book that already has cut a wide swath in the world of military veterans and others.” —The Oregonian

“A brave and honest memoir of living ‘in terror’s shadow,’ as well as a definitive account of the history, culture and science of the great affliction of our era… The Evil Hours is a gift of insight for survivors of combat stress and traumatic events of all kinds, as well as a call to action for the vast majority of Americans untouched by the brutality of more than 13 years at war.” —San Diego Union-Tribune
 
 “David J. Morris invites us into his own heart of darkness in order to deliver an unflinching and compassionate study of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is far more than a biography of a psychological condition, or a memoir of one individual, it is also a cogent analysis of an ever increasing phenomenon that has changed the landscape of our culture. If one has any hope of coming to grips with what shapes America every day, The Evil Hours is a must read.” —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
 
 “’Trauma destroys the normal narrative of life,’ Morris explains in this impassioned, well-researched, and beautifully written biography of an illness that we’ve only recently realized is an illness. Though he ‘hates the idea of turning writing into therapy,’ reading his book has helped this fellow sufferer. The Evil Hours is a much needed narrative.” —Ismet Prcic, author of Shards
 
 “Masterful and moving, David Morris’s investigation of this troubling psychiatric disorder asks all the important questions. This book honors suffering while also making room for hope.”  —Emily Bazelon, author of Sticks and Stones
 
 “A beautiful book, the non-fiction brother of Phil Klay's Redeployment. Read it.” —Tom Ricks, author of Fiasco and The Generals
 
 “This book has the hypnotic appeal of authenticity. David J. Morris is a writer, warrior, and sufferer, his words carry an inescapable truth. His story glides through the drifting incredulity of trauma, terrible memories, and the struggling science of comprehension. There is something addictive in his way of drawing you in. The Evil Hours is fascinating uncovering of the mind, unnervingly profound.” —Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void
 

From the Publisher

2014-11-06
An exploration of the enduring human cost of war.Journalist Morris (Storm on the Horizon: Khafji—The Battle that Changed the Course of the Gulf War, 2004), a former Marine and embedded reporter who suffers from PTSD, did not intend this book to be a therapeutic exercise, but he discovered that researching and writing about PTSD helped him to make sense of his own struggle with an affliction that "destroys the normal narrative of life." Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, biochemistry, history, poetry and fiction, he offers an insightful—and never self-indulgent—overview of the "ghost that haunts history." Among many traumatic stressors—rape, natural disasters, child abuse, for example—Morris focuses most intensely on war. The term PTSD emerged after Vietnam, but Morris discovered that soldiers' trauma was recognized in Judeo-Christian times, in ancient Greece and in the Middle Ages, when religious authorities imposed "prayer, fasting, and abstinence from communion" on warriors who had killed. Civil War veterans were diagnosed with "nostalgia," a term "used to indicate a number of conditions that today might be called clinical depression or simple panic." For World War I veterans, the term was shell shock. Symptoms were common to all: nightmares, flashback memories and paranoia. The author summarizes current cognitive and pharmacological therapies: prolonged exposure therapy, or flooding, which reprises intense trauma; cognitive-behavioral therapy, with roots in psychotherapy; propranolol, to treat anxiety and panic; selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac and Zoloft; eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing; and even yoga. In his experience, Morris has found "alcohol, taken in moderation, is one of the best PTSD drugs ever invented." Morris deplores civilians' lack of connection to soldiers' brutal experiences. If the truth were known, he writes, "we wouldn't continue to train, equip, and deploy warriors the way we do." If soldiers were welcomed with empathy, "half of combat PTSD…would disappear overnight." An eye-opening investigation of war's casualties.

Kirkus Reviews