Name: 【TED】Hector Garcia: We train soldiers for war. Let's train them to come home, too (We train soldiers for war. Let's train them to come home, too | Hector Garcia)
Uploaded: 2017-04-06T08:51:12.000Z
Duration: 10 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

who volunteered for three tours and got shot up in every one.

because he had so much shrapnel in his body

For the next 42 years, he suffered from nightmares,

Carlos had post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now, I became a psychologist to help mitigate human suffering,

and for the past 10 years, my target has been the suffering caused by PTSD,

Until recently, the science of PTSD just wasn't there.

Others we hospitalized and gave generic group therapy,

"Just go home and try to forget about your experiences."

More recently, we've tried therapy dogs, wilderness retreats --

many things which may temporarily relieve stress,

but which don't actually eliminate PTSD symptoms over the long term.

And I am here to tell you that we can now eliminate PTSD,

Because new scientific research has been able to show,

which treatments actually get rid of symptoms and which do not.

the best treatments for PTSD use many of the very same training principles

that the military uses in preparing its trainees for war.

We humans have been making war since before we were even fully human.

And since then, we have gone from using stone and sinew

to developing the most sophisticated and devastating weapon systems imaginable.

And to enable our warriors to use these weapons,

we employ the most cutting-edge training methods.

And we are good at training our warriors to fight.

Yet, when we consider the experience of the modern-day combat veteran,

we begin to see that we have not been as good

Well, our ancestors lived immersed in conflict,

So until only very recently in our evolutionary history,

there was hardly a need to learn how to come home from war,

most of humanity lives in far more peaceful societies,

and when there is conflict, we, especially in the United States,

now have the technology to put our warriors through advanced training,

drop them in to fight anywhere on the globe

But just imagine for a moment what this must feel like.

that one day they're in a brutal firefight in Afghanistan

and just three days later, they found themselves

toting an ice chest to their kid's soccer game.

It's the most common term I've heard to describe that experience.

Because while our warriors spend countless hours training for war,

that many require training on how to return to civilian life.

Now, like any training, the best PTSD treatments require repetition.

we don't simply hand trainees Mark-19 automatic grenade launchers

and say, "Here's the trigger, here's some ammo and good luck."

No. We train them, on the range and in specific contexts,

until lifting their weapon and engaging their target

that it can be performed without even thinking,

even under the most stressful conditions you can imagine.

Now, the same holds for training-based treatments.

The first of these treatments is cognitive therapy,

and this is a kind of mental recalibration.

their way of mentally framing the world is calibrated

to an immensely more dangerous environment.

So when you try to overlay that mind frame onto a peacetime environment,

You begin drowning in worries about dangers that aren't present.

You begin not trusting family or friends.

Which is not to say there are no dangers in civilian life; there are.

It's just that the probability of encountering them

So we never advise veterans to turn off caution completely.

We do train them, however, to adjust caution

If you find yourself in a bad neighborhood,

【TED】Hector Garcia: We train soldiers for war. Let's train them to come home, too (We train soldiers for war. Let's train them to come home, too | Hector Garcia)

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【TED】Hector Garcia: We train soldiers for war. Let's train them to come home, too (We train soldiers for war. Let's train them to come home, too | Hector Garcia)

anxiety

mental

engage

eliminate