The article, “Is PTSD Contagious?,” by Mac McClelland, advances the argument that spouses and children of returning veterans develop the same mental and emotional symptoms as the traumatized vets.
The author specifically selected the word “contagious” for the title of her article. However, is the term “contagious” an appropriate claim when dealing with mental illness? This terminology could be described as offensive to many people who believe mental illness shouldn’t be downgrade, and compared to a spreading cold-like sickness. Mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders aren’t contagious and are serious issues that shouldn’t be undermined.
The author incorporates the repeated phrase, “Brannan Vines has never been to war,” to focus on the effects of secondhand Post Traumatic Stress Disorder occurring in the family. Brannan Vines is married to Caleb Vines, a war veteran who served his time in Iraq twice, as a designated marksman. The phrase states that Brannan hasn’t physically experienced the traumatic events that her husband has from war. However, she’s adopted similar PTSD characteristics as her husband. These symptoms include: adrenaline-sharp ability to quickly scan for danger, super stimuli-sensitive, hyper vigilance, and hyperawareness. Caleb has returned home from Iraq for many years now, but still experiences detailed flashbacks, hyper vigilance, reoccurring nightmares, and chronic emotional pain. His symptoms also include: losing the ability to focus, decreased sexual desire, memory loss and severe brain damage. Caleb typically spends his days buried in his bedroom for up to 20 hours, battling his own thoughts in hopes of forgetting his disturbing past experiences. Caleb feels like a burden to his family, especially his wife, and questions why she doesn’t leave him already. The author refers back to the couple’s relationship several times to not only show how the family is struggling with Caleb’s PTSD symptoms, but with the added stress of balancing a romantic relationship too.
Brannan Vines has suffered emotionally and mentally as well, caring for her husband’s needs and raising their young daughter, Katie. The depressing, stressful environment that’s inhabited the once joyful Vine home, has affected every family member. Brannan is constantly on alert, and finds tasks that once seemed simple, to now be challenging because of these secondhand PTSD symptoms. The simple act of using a washing machine is now an adrenaline-pumping, intense task. Katie Vines looks like the typical kindergarten student to most outsiders, but the people who are close to her, acknowledge a significant change in personality. Katie has been acting naughty in school, and speaking of unusual, violent topics for her age. Brannan tries to scold her daughter for bad behavior, but how can she blame her daughter for acting out when her child’s constantly exposed to a negative atmosphere at home? Katie is experiencing secondhand PTSD symptoms.
Although Brannan maintains a complicated, busy schedule with her own family, she still reaches out to help other veteran families in need. Brannan Vines is an inspiring, selfless woman, who puts other’s needs before her own. The Department of Veteran Affairs, also where Brannan works, tries to help veterans and their families, but still lacks research and resources. Many places dedicated to helping veterans ironically aren’t able to pay for the medical resources, such as therapy, that most veterans suffering with PTSD need.
A VA nurse once said to Brannan after seeing Caleb, “I guess we’re just used to dealing with people with more severe injuries.” This quote shows the amount of knowledge the VA is lacking, considering Caleb is a severe case… and he got rejected for treatment. The author’s placement of this example is significantly useful. The whole article focuses on the family’s struggles coping with secondhand PTSD and Caleb’s firsthand symptoms. The audience has now become familiar with the family’s problems and feel sympathetic. Therefore, having an outside source tell the Vines family that Caleb isn’t a serious enough case, shows how much worse other people may be suffering from PTSD and produces stronger emotions from the audience.
The increase of veterans suffering from PTSD and their families from secondhand PTSD is prevalent in today’s society and on the rise. Brannan Vines and many others are desperately searching for help and need others’ support. However, Mac McClelland could make her viewpoint more reputable by not using the term “contagious” when describing PTSD.
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Counterintuitive Spring 2024 
feedback was requested.
Feedback provided. —DSH
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Hey, tagf!
P1. You’re getting good at this. Your first sentence wastes no time declaring the primary theme you will address. It could be more precise though, and always should be when possible. With just a few words of alteration, you could make the vastly more deliberate statement:
I say this not to criticize your own sentence but to demonstrate that small rephrasings (the type that usually occur during rewrites) sharpen and clarify the vague assertions of first efforts.
Ask yourself as you read each sentence in your later paragraphs, “Does this say enough and say it clearly?”
Punctuation: Book titles get italics; Article titles get quotation marks. Article titles that end in question marks create special problems.
P2. I like your immediate concentration on “secondhand PTSD,” tagf. That little phrase encapsulates a very big argument into two words.
—Your infinitive “to emphasis” is incorrect.
—You make a couple of fuzzy claims. Does the author merely emphasize PTSD? Or does she emphasize that it’s occurring in this family?
—Does she suggest that Brannan hasn’t been to war? She could do more than suggest.
—Your claim that Caleb has returned for over 8 years gives the impression that he’s been traveling for nearly a decade.
—similar behaviors as her husband is grammatically incorrect
—I know it’s difficult to handle a long list of symptoms, but to say “they continue” means they persist, not that your list goes on.
—Your “often,” “most,” and “for up to 20 hours” is redundant
You’ve spent a paragraph saying that Brannan shares her husband’s symptoms, but then ignoring her in favor of a long list of Caleb’s symptoms. For the most part, this is summary, not critical reading. You’re spending your time cataloging what McClelland says instead of critiquing her argument.
P3. The pattern of your essay has become very clear. You made a single statement at the top that the family is being used to demonstrate secondhand PTSD.
You followed that with a paragraph that made a general statement about Brannan then catalogued Caleb’s symptoms.
Now you’ve written a paragraph with more general statements about Brannan followed by a catalog of Katie’s behavior.
P4
P5
P6
These are summary paragraphs. They do a fine job of expressing McClelland’s basic thesis, but they don’t engage with her argument. A better Critical Reading would question her premises, evidence, and conclusions.
Grade Code 9D4
Grades are decoded at Professor Conferences.
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Here’s the assignment again. Remember, the model for a critical reading was the very close analysis we reviewed in class of the video about Harvesting Death Row Organs.
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Thank you for your feedback, I found it helpful. I revised my paper by changing some sentence structure, grammar mistakes, and incorporating more controversial claims from the author’s article. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to post my edited paper in the “Leave a Reply” area as a comment or delete my old work and paste it new. But, I figured I was supposed to edit my original.
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You are correct, tagf, and now that we’ve started to engage in a feedback/revision process, you’ll soon be very comfortable with that process. WordPress keeps track of all versions and lets you compare them side by side in the Edit mode. I will demonstrate for you. Therefore, the approach we use is to write the revisions directly over the old draft. (You don’t really want to see that old draft anyway.)
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