Learning How to Treat PTSD

The Pathway Home Makes Inroads in Treating PTSD

Smithsonian magazine, September 2010 - An innovative California facility offers hope to combatants with post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries

The Pathway Home encourages its residents to go into the community. "The real test is when you go outside," explains program director Fred Gusman: Catherine Karnow

They went off to war brimming with confidence and eager for the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. They returned, many of them, showing no visible wounds but utterly transformed by combat—with symptoms of involuntary trembling, irritability, restlessness, depression, nightmares, flashbacks, insomnia, emotional numbness, sensitivity to noise, and, all too often, a tendency to seek relief in alcohol, drugs or suicide.

“Families and friends are shocked when one of these guys comes back,” says Fred Gusman, a social worker and mental health specialist now serving as director of the Pathway Home, a nonprofit residential treatment center in Yountville, California, where active and retired service members suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) are learning to make the hard transition from war to civilian life.

“The guy who looked like G.I. Joe when he left home comes back a different person,” says Gusman, a Vietnam-era veteran who pioneered treatment for warriors suffering from stress-related illness in the 1970s. “We called it post-Vietnam syndrome back then,” Gusman adds, noting a link between combat and mental trauma that dates to the Civil War. That war produced an anxiety disorder known as “soldier’s heart”; World War I gave rise to shell shock; World War II and Korea produced battle fatigue. {read more}

The Shock of War

World War I troops were the first to be diagnosed with shell shock, an injury – by any name – still wreaking havoc. {read more}