When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans

The MIT Press NEWS

Paula J. Caplan

Author Paula J. Caplan

Traumatized veterans returning from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are often diagnosed as suffering from a psychological disorder and prescribed a regimen of psychotherapy and psychiatric drugs. But why, asks psychologist Paula J. Caplan in this impassioned book, is it a mental illness to be devastated by war?

What is a mentally healthy response to death, destruction, and moral horror? In When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home, Caplan argues that the standard treatment of therapy and drugs is often actually harmful. It adds to veterans' burdens by making them believe wrongly that they should have gotten over it; it isolates them behind the closed doors of the therapist's office; and it makes them rely on often harmful drugs. The numbers of traumatized veterans from past and present wars who continue to suffer demonstrate the ineffectiveness of this approach.
 

Sending anguished veterans off to talk to therapists, writes Caplan, conveys the message that the rest of us don't want to listen or that we don't feel qualified to listen. As a result, the truth about war is kept under wraps. Most of us remain ignorant about what war is really like and continue to allow our governments to go to war without much protest. Caplan proposes an alternative: that we welcome veterans back into our communities and listen to their stories, one-on-one. (She provides guidelines for conducting these conversations.) This would begin a long overdue national discussion about the realities of war, and it would start the healing process for our returning veterans.


Paula J. Caplan, a clinical and research psychologist, is an Affiliate at Harvard University's DuBois Institute and a Fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of The Myth of Women's Masochism, They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal, and eight other books. Her articles, essays, and op-eds have appeared in both scholarly and popular publications.
FORTHCOMING March 2011 ¥ 320 pp., $27.95/£20.95 cloth ¥ 978-0-262-01554-7

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http://www.whenjohnnyandjanecomemarching.weebly.com/

Endorsements
“This is a work of profound and astonishing humanity. A distinguished champion of public health, Paula Caplan shows that emotional trauma is often the normal and healthy response of soldiers to the brutalities of warfare. So what we need is not a narrow redefinition of the soldier’s experience as a medical ‘syndrome’ but rather an honest social healing process that treats the soldier with dignity and respect—and as a harbinger of hope for all of society."
—Jamin Raskin, Professor of Law, American University, and Maryland State Senator


“Finally we have an all-encompassing, meticulously researched, brilliantly thought-out, and marvelously written book about the effects of war on humans—and how all of us can help our veterans heal. Dr. Caplan cuts through the smoke of the institutional lies to the true nature of the emotional injuries sustained by these poor souls and offers a detailed and sensible path to healing. This brave and astonishing book stands as the classic, and the standard, for understanding the atrocities of war.”
—Samuel Shem, author of The Spirit of the Place and The House of God


“I am truly amazed by Caplan’s grasp of not only the psyche of the combat veteran but of the human heart and soul as a whole. There is no prosthesis for the amputated spirit, but Caplan certainly comes close to discovering just that through her extraordinary insight. Brilliant!”
—Michelle Wilmot, Women’s Outreach Coordinator for Vets4Vets