Page 299 - Total War on PTSD Final

Unfortunately, loneliness presents a real problem for many Veterans. To exemplify, in a study among aging Vietnam Veterans, 44% reported feeling lonely at least some of the time, and of these, 10.4% reported feeling lonely often (Kuwert, Knaevelsrud, & Pietrzak, 2014). Another study, among Israeli Veterans, indicated that for Veterans who experienced a mental breakdown on the battlefield, loneliness rates remained high for decades after the war (Solomon, Bensimon, Greene, Horesh, & Ein-Dor, 2015). This pervasiveness places Veterans at increased risk for loneliness’ aforementioned deleterious impact. Indeed, scientific work focusing specifically on Veterans’ loneliness, albeit surprisingly scarce (G. Wilson, Hill, & Kiernan, 2018), indicates that this loneliness may be strongly related to and exacerbated by Veterans’ psychiatric conditions (e.g., their depression as well as acute and chronic post-traumatic stress reactions; Kuwert et al., 2014; Martin & Hartley, 2017; Solomon et al., 2015), and highly conducive of suicidal inclinations (i.e., suicide ideation and attempts; Bryan & Rudd, 2012; Teo et al., 2018). It is for these reasons that it is vital to address Veterans’ loneliness with utmost seriousness and concern.
That said, the guiding notion of this chapter is that loneliness is anything but a homogeneous experience. I will elaborate on this in a moment, but at this point it is important to realize that this implies that if we wish to adequately address and alleviate a person’s loneliness, it is paramount that we first and foremost understand its nature within the specific context wherein it transpires (Stein & Tuval-Mashiach, 2015b). Therefore, in the present chapter, I primarily explicate the nature of the experience of loneliness as it stems from being a combat Veteran and elaborate upon the manner in which Post-Traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD) adds additional strata to this loneliness,
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