the effects of the war on soldiers

In Sue Halpern's article, "Virtual Iraq", she argues how positive of a recovery this new virtual Iraq therapy program can bring to former soldiers. This type of therapy has seemed to help victims of PTSD a lot better than verbal therapy. Victims disliked just talking about their experiences because it didn't help them to get over the post-war depression.This article included a story about a man by the name of Travis Boyd who was a marine. He told of his experiences and things he went through such as " sleeping on floors of abandoned houses, where they'd often have to remove dead bodies in order to lay out their bedrolls"(116). He also told of the worst day when the team leader was shot dead. These such experiences contributed to the development of Boyd's PTSD. Boyd was barely able to continue doing his job and even when he returned home he couldn't complete regular tasks that a individual normally would such as:driving, going out at night, or being in contact with crowds(117). Virtual Iraq was a program in which "patients worked through their combat trauma in a computer-simulated environment"(117). This program involved a head-mounted display, earphones, a scent-producing machine, and a modified version of Full Spectrum Warrior to simulate the feeling of actually being back in combat. A critique of this program was that it would make the victims of PTSD more upset because they would be reliving the fear and emotions all over again but it actually ended up having the reverse effect. Because the victims were experiencing this repeatedly, they were becoming used to this and moving towards the steps of recovery. In one instance, " of the five subjects who had completed treatment, four no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD" (124). The warrant for this article is that this virtual reality form of therapy will work for everyone that is suffering from PTSD when that is not necessarily the case.