Wood’s World

Why should you join the army? There are a number of reasons people have for joining the military; patriotism, fun, adventure, money, a career, a secure future. Are these good reasons? Do they out way the costs?

Patriotism

My particular pet hate is patriotism. You want to join the military because you are loyal to your country, your government.

If you were born in an opposing country, or you moved to that country when you were very young, you would feel the exact same way about that country and you would be fighting against the people who would probably be your mates if you happened to be born closer or live closer to them.

You’ve been conditioned to beleive that your country are the ‘goodies’ and the opposing ones are the ‘baddies’, Whether that is the case or not. The government might tell you that the supposedly threatening countries have nuclear weapons, they might tell you they had something to do with an attack on your country. If you are in the military, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, you have to do what they tell you to do. You might help kill thousands of people, then find out later that the country in question didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction and didn’t have anything to do with an attack on your country, the reason you were actually there is very different. Patriotism? I think not.

Patriotism doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If you are truly patriotic and it means a lot to you, instead of joining an institution that deals in killing and is all to often used as a tool for economic expansion covered up by lies about an immediate threat on your homes and way of life. Join the fire brigade, become a doctor, a nurse or a paramedic, become a scientist to progress technology. That way you will be contributing much more to your society, your country and the people around you. You will be helping people, saving lives and increasing standards of living without having to hurt people in the process. Most importantly, you won’t be killing people for potentially false reasons.

It looks fun on the Ads

I admit it, it looks great. Running around playing war games, building bridges, climbing mountains, devising tactics.

But the “adventure” they profess in the adverts is merely code for war, the “discipline” code for violence. The military trains you to kill, to be a drone, a cog in the machine. Recruiters and advertisements unsurprisingly avoid addressing the dehumanizing process undertaken to achieve this. They conveniently forget the psychological costs of killing, or the horrors of war. The ads lie because the product is mentally harmful, and lethal to you and/or others.

When the careers adviser came to my high school, I was around 15 or 16, I told him my interests and my best subjects etc. He ‘listened’ and his conclusion was that I should join the R.A.F. Of course, I didn’t give the idea a moments consideration. Later I realised that he had suggested that half of my class should join the R.A.F. I’ve often wondered why that guy was telling us all to join the R.A.F. Was it just a cop out to make his job easier, or was he trying to recruit us? Either way I didn’t like it.

Read what the recruiter never told you about joining the military.

Money, Career, Training. A Good Base For Your Future.

“The reason to have a military is to be prepared to fight and win wars…it’s not a jobs program.” - Dick Cheney former U.S Secretary of Defence.

25% of the homeless population in America are veterans. There are 18 suicides every day by America veterans, who have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Why does this happen? Many recruits become institutionalised. If you have come out of school and joined the army at a young age, you don’t know anything except the military. When you eventually leave, or are discharged you may find it difficult to adapt back to civilian life.

In an article about ex-paratrooper Stuart Griffiths from the guardian online, he states.

“There is always a problem with them [veterans] accepting society, or society accepting them,” he says.

Many ex-forces personnel came from difficult family backgrounds, were institutionalised in the services and ill-prepared for civilian life.

Add to this what Stuart calls the “real problem with alcohol abuse”, and the unloading, in civilian life, of the the psychological traumas stored up during time in the forces - and the outlook is bleak.

Of course, this doesn’t happen to everyone. But you have to consider whether the military is the best place go for a career and a secure, happy future. It’s not. There are many alternatives which also offer on the job training, are geared towards offering a service or helping others, which allow you to keep your civil rights and don’t involve killing people.

In modern day western culture, we live in an affluent world full of choice and decisions. Generally, as time progresses, remaining pleased with a decision you made is likely to make you happy. Whereas becoming displeased with a decision you have made could make you unhappy, depending upon the importance and the ramifications of that decision. So the question is, what makes you become unhappy with a decision?

Usually, the unhappiness or stress is caused when it becomes apparent that the decision you made didn’t turn out to be the best one. Who will you blame for this? Yourself most probably, after all you were the one that made the choice. You will end up feeling regretful. Another source of unhappiness is the choosing process its self, the fear of regret and the desperate need to avoid it.

I’ll give you an example to demonstrate this. My farther recently had a decision to make regarding three different pension schemes. Without boring you with the details, I’ll just say that they were significantly different, but none of them were substantially better than the others. This was causing him quite a lot of unrest and displeasure, even though they were all very good financially and most people would have been delighted with any one of the options. The reason for this stress was because of the multiple choices that he had. If he was only offered one of the three options, he would have been very pleased with it. It wouldn’t have caused him months of unrest and worry about which option would be the best one.

So there is this idea that the more you have to choose from, the harder it is to make a choice and be satisfied with it, which leads to more people being unhappy with the decisions they make. We’ve all been in the situation where we order a meal from a restaurant, only to be dissatisfied with it when everyone else’s meals come out and you wish you had chosen one of theirs instead.

In many situations, if we only had fewer options to choose from, sure we might not have as much abundance of choice (some would call it ‘freedom’) but we would probably be more happy with the choice we made because there is less opportunity to think that we got it wrong and then blame ourselves for getting it wrong.

In most cases, I’m quite good at accepting the decisions I make, even if they were not the best in retrospect. But this is because I’ve thought about all this and I’ve seen on many occasions how decision making and regret can make people unhappy. I’d rather be more accepting and have more of an “oh well, nothing I can do now except learn from it” sort of attitude.

I’ll end with this illustration which was shown in a lecture by Barry Schwartz. It’s a great depiction of the old proverb the grass is always greener on the other side. This is another thing that can limit your happiness given a particular choice or sittuation. If you are always thinking about what could have been or could be, you will never live in the moment and always be looking at how you can change a given situation to make it better, rather than enjoying what you have.

The Josef Fritzl trial brought nothing but sympathy for his abused children. But what about all the other unreported cases of children who are abused?

The trial of Josef Fritzel, the man who imprisoned and abused his daughter Elisabeth, was in the news when I was writing this article. Quite rightly people are appalled and indignant about cases of abuse that hit the headlines. But what if Elisabeth or her children have mental health problems, self-harm, use drugs or alcohol or display ‘unacceptable’ behaviour – will we tut and say they should be punished or will we say it’s not surprising that they’re having difficulties? Won’t we expect them to receive the right care, support and understanding?

But what about all those children who are abused who do not come to the attention of the public. They are very damaged by abuse: sexual, physical or psychological, throughout their childhood. Many grow up with mental health problems or self-harm or they use drugs and alcohol or commit low level crime or have a combination of all these issues. They may be labelled personality disordered. Yet isn’t it understandable if their ability to relate with others is sometimes impaired? They’ve been let down and emotionally traumatised at times in their life when they should have been secure and free to develop into confident people. We should be just as indignant about the abuse that these people have suffered. Yet what happens all too often in reality? The truth is that many end up in prison.

Many ‘survivors’ of abuse are excluded from mainstream services either because the variety or combination of issues they have do not fit into the criteria of segregated services or because their ‘challenging behaviour’ is too uncomfortable. They are left fighting against the odds and are consistently let down.

“Prisons are all too often used as repositories for those who are neglected and rejected by other services in the community.” (pg 6, SCMH, 2008)

Wouldn’t we be shocked if that happened to Elisabeth and her children because there was a failure to give them the right services?

“There are many women in prison, either on remand or serving sentences for minor, non-violent offences, for whom prison is both disproportionate and inappropriate. Many of them suffer poor physical and mental health or substance abuse or both. Large numbers have endured violent or sexual abuse or had chaotic childhoods. Many have been in care. I have concluded that we are rightly exercised about paedophiles, but seem to have little sympathy, understanding or interest in those who have been their victims, many of whom end up in prison.” (pg i , Corston, 2007)

The following is a number of statistics about the prison population in the UK:

• 72% of men, 70% women have two or more mental health ‘disorders’
• 62% of men, 57% women have been diagnosed with personality disorder
• 66% of men, 55% of women have used drugs
• 63% of men and 39% women are ‘hazardous’ drinkers
• 50% of women, 25% men have suffered domestic violence
• 1 in 3 women have experienced sexual abuse
• 15,800 self harm incidents in 2008, 54% by women who are only 5% of prison population
• 30% of young women (18-20 yrs) have been sexually abused
• 71% have been in care
• 69% harm themselves
• 2 out of 5 girls, 1 out of 4 boys (12-17 years) have suffered violence at home
• 1 in 3 girls, 1 in 20 boys have experienced sexual abuse

Source (pdf)

Given that 1 in 4 people in prison have spent time in local authority care as a child, 40% of women in prison left school before the age of 16 and 1 in 10 were 13 or younger, 30% of women have had psychiatric admission before going to prison, it begs the question - why did the care system, school and mental health services fail to help them?

Three quarters of people with mental health problems leave prison with no follow-up care. The majority are even worse off than when they went in: they are left homeless, jobless, estranged from their families, in debt and their children have been taken into care.

People who have had a life time of experiences that drain their self-esteem and sense of self-worth are treated in ways that compound this. They are abused people who are abused again by the ‘system’. What kind of society countenances distressed people who are much more likely to harm themselves than the ‘public’ being put into a prison environment?

Over the years I’ve had service users tell me they have been abused. I’ve asked them if their mental health workers know and they invariably say “No, I’ve never been asked.” How can people be given the most useful support if something that more often than not has had a very profound effect on them goes unrecognised? People should be asked about their experiences. They may choose not to talk about them but they need to be given the opportunity. Practitioners need to be equipped to know what to do to support people who disclose abuse so that they are not afraid to ask the questions. Integrated services should be available that prevent people falling through the gaps.

Let’s stop punishing people who have been abused and let’s stop discriminating against them because sometimes the way they cope is uncomfortable. Let’s start getting indignant on their behalf and show them respect for surviving.

This article is now featured at abyss2hope.

Written for woods-world.com by Tina Braithwaite

References:

Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile, Prison Reform Trust, Dec 2008
Corston, B (2007), The Corston Report: A Review of Women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system, Home Office
Durcan, G (2008), From the Inside: Experiences of Prison Mental Health Care, SCMH

I realise that I’m about to comment on, and criticise in places, the social networking culture on a weblog. Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me. Therefore I will begin by specifying exactly what I am talking about in this article.

Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Bebo etc. The type of social networking sites which allow the user to have a profile page, which they can fill with pictures, comments about what they are doing, video’s etc.

You may ask - What’s the difference between that and a blog? That depends entirely on the blog, how it’s constructed, the purpose and most of all the content.

There are most definitely good things about these social networking sites. The main benefit for me is they allow you to stay in touch with people who may be on the other side of the world, or people that you wouldn’t normally see very often but you still consider good friends. They give you a convenient place to host your photo’s which can act as an extra back up – Recently two friends of mine had their apartment burgled, they lost their laptops and camera, they commented that thankfully they had their pictures uploaded on Facebook so they hadn’t lost them all in the theft. Sending messages over these social networking sites can be much easier than using email, because you have a comprehensive and visual ‘address book’.

What I don’t like about these social networking sites is the culture surrounding them, which leads to you hearing things like “that’s a good one for Facebook” when someone takes a photo, or when you sense that the main reason someone is taking a photo is to put it on their social networking profile. A friend of mine commented that it used to be better before these social networking sites came about, because when someone said they would meet you somewhere or be at some event, they would actually turn up because they didn’t feel they could easily fob you off via a non face to face or voice to voice communication i.e. an impersonal text message.

I recently came across this t-shirt design to the right on despair.com. An amusing Venn diagram which shows the three behavioral disorders driving the continued growth of some of the most heavily trafficked social networking sites. Although it’s meant as a joke, there is some truth in it.

Often the things that annoy people the most are things they disagree with or dislike seeing, that they know they are guilty of allowing themselves to get sucked into doing. Which is what inspired me to write this article. I sometimes find myself with some spare time and I end up on a social networking site, reading about how someone I haven’t seen or spoken to for 4 or 5 years “can’t wait to go and get drunk on Friday” or I see one interesting photo and end up trawling though the rest of the album. Afterward I always think to myself – What am I doing? This is a complete waste of time, why would I be remotely interested in someone being “all puffed out after blowing balloons up for rob’s birthday!!” I don’t even know who rob is. The time you waste doing these things (non of which you will remember in two days) could be spent on reading a stimulating book, or bettering yourself in some way, like learning to play the guitar for instance.

To stop myself falling into this trap which Facebook and the like set up for me, I’ve decided that every time I think about going on Facebook for no particular reason, I will instead attempt to make a contribution to my site, or pick up my guitar and mess about on it for a bit, or try to discover some new music to listen to. Anything to stop myself accidentally on purpose looking though another “night out in town” photo album with the same drunken pictures of people holding up alchopops.