Traumatic Stress Disorder In The Film 'Thirty Days With My Father'

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Hendrix 1 Gracee Hendrix Professor Mooney English 1106 15 October 2013 Fight-or-Flight Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, also known as PTSD, is an anxiety disorder that may develop during or after an experience of a terrifying event or ordeal in which severe physical harm occurred or a person was exposed to threats ("Psychology Today"). This disorder can harm anyone that experienced a traumatic situation. Today, it is most commonly known as the disorder returning soldiers develop from having experienced an extreme emotional trauma on the battlefield. People who have PTSD may feel stressed or frightened even when they are no longer in danger. Christal Presley’s memoir Thirty Days with My Father: Finding Peace from wartime PTSD and the movie The Dry Land directed and written by Ryan Piers Williams both portray…show more content…
James does not remember a good deal about the war and it's soon clear he has Post-traumatic Stress. His loving wife, mother, and best friend provide support, but they cannot fully understand the pain and sorrow he feels since his tour of duty ended in Iraq. In The Dry Land, James shows every sign of having PTSD, but he does not know how to handle and control himself. Everyone he was close to expected things to go right back to normal when he returned home, but the complete opposite actually happened. In multiple scenes of the movie, James would hide his pain and distress by drinking alcohol. He then would get out of hand and verbally and most of all physically hurt the ones he loved most, especially his wife Sara (Williams). Along with the abusive behavior, James would often have nightmares, difficulty sleeping, angry outbursts, memory loss, and bouts of heavy drinking. Hyperarousal symptoms are usually constant, instead of being triggered by things that remind one of the traumatic event. They
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