In February of 2006, I started what became the first website on combat veterans and PTSD, called HealingCombatTrauma.com.
The website came about as the result of a chance meeting with a Marine officer deployed to Ramadi (when the Sunni Triangle was an incredible hot spot), which enlarged to daily, sometimes hourly communication about the situation as he experienced it in real-time, on the ground. I started thinking back to the resources I’d developed during years writing about health, medicine and wellness — and what I’d learned during my own recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome in the 1990s — and developed the first website in the English language on combat veterans and PTSD.
(The connection between chronic fatigue and PTSD, while nebulous, is basically a symbolic one: They both have multiple, often unrelated symptoms, and typically doctors hadn’t offered much hope that you would recover, while prescribing antidepressants and suggesting that you’d have to live with the condition, forever. That’s the extent to which the experiences are at all similar. I naturally assumed veterans might not receive much more constructive advice or options for their PTS as I had for my chronic fatigue syndrome, and they might be LESS likely than I was to read every medical journal article on the topic, identify and interview every leading expert, etc. So offering became my contribution.)
In the years since then, it’s gone on to become a well-known and highly regarded resource, and there’s a Facebook page and a Twitter presence. If you’d like to more about my background in this, and what I’ve accomplished since the website started, read the material linked here.
Lily Casura, MSW 