Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Kyle And Rambo

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (or PTSD) according to the National Health Institute is “an anxiety disorder caused by very stressful, frightening or distressing events.” It also says that PTSD affect about 1 in every 3 people who have a traumatic experience. The Mayo Clinic says the top five most common events leading to PTSD are; Combat exposure, childhood neglect and physical abuse, sexual assault, physical attack, and being threatened with a weapon. This would explain further why both Chris Kyle and Rambo developed PTSD since they were both exposed to combat and threatened with weapons. People with PTSD often relive the traumatic events through nightmares, and flashbacks, and may feel guilt for what happened. Although you usually hear about

Re-experiencing symptoms, according to NIMH, are having things such as; flashbacks, bad dreams, and frightening thoughts. This category of symptoms can cause problems in people’s everyday routine. These symptoms can be caused by anything from hearing a crash to seeing a certain object that triggers a flashback. Both Kyle and Rambo experience this type of symptom. Kyle experiences this when his own dog was just playing with his kid but through Kyle’s eyes, he thought his dog was trying to attack his kid, so this causes him to go and attack the dog before Taya (his wife) got his attention and he stopped. In Rambo’s case in the movie you get to see the flashbacks to when he was in Vietnam to things one of I mentioned earlier with the razor. The second symptom is avoidance, which is staying away from the place, event, or object that reminds the person of the traumatic event, you can also experience feeling numb, strong guilt, losing interest in thing you found once enjoyable, and having trouble remembering the experience. This may make the person change their routine to avoid triggering the memory. Chris Kyle also experienced this because whenever a soldier died, he felt guilty because he was unable to locate the sniper that hit them. As well as when he was home Kyle would sit in front of the TV without it on but imagine he was watching what’s going on

The ways PTSD can be treated are psychotherapy, or talk therapy. Everyone’s different which means a treatment that works for one person might not work for another. According to the NIMH psychotherapy involves talking to a mental health professional. Also research shows that support from family and friends can be an important part of therapy. The NIMH says a helpful type of therapy is cognitive behavioral therapy. Which has several parts which include, exposure therapy, cognitive restructuring, and stress inoculation training. Exposure therapy helps people face/control their fear. This may involve taking them to the place in which the event happened and make them feel safe while there. The second part is cognitive restructuring in which the therapy helps people make sense of the bad memories. Resulting in them remembering the event differently than it happened making them feel guilty about what was not their fault. The third part is stress inoculation training during this stage therapy tries to reduce the symptoms by teaching them how to reduce anxiety. Kyle after his fourth tour goes and sees a therapist that he talks to and he says, “What haunts me are all the guys that I could not save,” so the therapist mentioned that down any of the hallways there are plenty of soldiers that need saving. Although the therapist is not exposing Kyle to what he experienced he gave an alternate since