Enter the Kafkaesque world of America’s famous but notorious Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), where returning soldiers seek a new start to the rest of their lives. Can they overcome the traumas of war, and military service, if they are also at war with the VA? The answer is both No – government bureaucracy can be as formidable a foe as that on any battlefield or in the barracks – and Yes, given veterans’ willingness to face the demons of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), drug addiction and other military-related traumas with the help of fiercely committed social workers, psychologists and healthcare experts. Andrea Plate, author and Licensed Clinical Social Worker, spent 15 years working with America’s wounded warriors. From battlefield to bedside to group talk-therapy, she exposes the human face of war, up close and personal, and some of the most remarkably resilient souls who survived it.

What happened to soldiers who suffered psychologically in the First World War? Here, this long-ignored aspect of Australian military history is closely and compassionately examined and linked with so-called shell shock and moral injury.

Over the years, some 20,000 books and articles have been written about Alexander the Great, the vast majority hailing him as possibly the greatest general that ever lived. Richard A. Gabriel, however, argues that, while Alexander was clearly a succesful soldier-adventurer, the evidence of real greatness is simply not there. ?The author presents Alexander as a misfit within his own warrior society, attempting to overcompensate. Thoroughly insecure and unstable, he was given to episodes of uncontrollable rage and committed brutal atrocities that would today have him vilified as a monstrous psychopath. The author believes some of his worst excesses may have been due to what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, of which he displays many of the classic symptoms, brought on by extended exposure to violence and danger. Above all the author thinks that Alexander's military ability has been flattered by History. Alexander was tactically competent but contributed nothing truly original, while his strategy was often flawed and distorted by his obsession with personal glory. This radical reappraisal is certain to provoke debate.

“Riveting. . . a testament to a misconceived war, and to the ease with which ordinary men, under certain conditions, can transform into monsters.”—New York Times Book Review This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division’s fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment—a unit known as “the Black Heart Brigade.” Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq’s so-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south of Baghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably the country’s most dangerous location at its most dangerous time. Hit by near-daily mortars, gunfire, and roadside bomb attacks, suffering from a particularly heavy death toll, and enduring a chronic breakdown in leadership, members of one Black Heart platoon—1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion—descended, over their year-long tour of duty, into a tailspin of poor discipline, substance abuse, and brutality. Four 1st Platoon soldiers would perpetrate one of the most heinous war crimes U.S. forces have committed during the Iraq War—the rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and the cold-blooded execution of her and her family. Three other 1st Platoon soldiers would be overrun at a remote outpost—one killed immediately and two taken from the scene, their mutilated corpses found days later booby-trapped with explosives. Black Hearts is an unflinching account of the epic, tragic deployment of 1st Platoon. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with Black Heart soldiers and first-hand reporting from the Triangle of Death, Black Hearts is a timeless story about men in combat and the fragility of character in the savage crucible of warfare. But it is also a timely warning of new dangers emerging in the way American soldiers are led on the battlefields of the twenty-first century.

On the afternoon of October 3, 1993, two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down over the Somali capital of Mogadishu, leaving a handful of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operators at the mercy of several thousand approaching militants. Ordered to "go find the glow"—the burning wreckage—hard-charging Capt. Mike Whetstone, commander of a Quick Reaction Company in the 10th Mountain Division, led part of the convoy sent to rescue the survivors. This powerfully vivid story of modern war is the intense firsthand account of the mission to find the crash site and retrieve the downed soldiers. • Raw descriptions of urban combat in the labyrinthine streets and shantytowns of Mogadishu • Complements the bestselling book and Oscar-winning movie Black Hawk Down, which recounts these events primarily from the perspective of the Rangers and Delta Force • Presents battle-tested lessons for young leaders

No More Heroes is an in-depth exploration of madness and psychiatry in war from Richard A. Gabriel. The author, a former intelligence officer, traces the history of madness in war, reveals information about the behavior of men in combat, and uncovers its implications for the modern battlefield.

This book provides a novel approach to the study of security and global governance by demonstrating that psychological interventions are integral to global governmentality.

Madness: A History is a thorough and accessible account of madness from antiquity to modern times, offering a large-scale yet nuanced picture of mental illness and its varieties in western civilization. The book opens by considering perceptions and experiences of madness starting in Biblical times, Ancient history and Hippocratic medicine to the Age of Enlightenment, before moving on to developments from the late 18th century to the late 20th century and the Cold War era. Petteri Pietikäinen looks at issues such as 18th century asylums, the rise of psychiatry, the history of diagnoses, the experiences of mental health patients, the emergence of neuroses, the impact of eugenics, the development of different treatments, and the late 20th century emergence of anti-psychiatry and the modern malaise of the worried well. The book examines the history of madness at the different levels of micro-, meso- and macro: the social and cultural forces shaping the medical and lay perspectives on madness, the invention and development of diagnoses as well as the theories and treatment methods by physicians, and the patient experiences inside and outside of the mental institution. Drawing extensively from primary records written by psychiatrists and accounts by mental health patients themselves, it also gives readers a thorough grounding in the secondary literature addressing the history of madness. An essential read for all students of the history of mental illness, medicine and society more broadly.

Since the earliest medical, philosophical, and literary texts in ancient civilizations, madness has posed some basic issues: how to separate sanity from insanity, to distinguish mental and bodily illnesses, and to specify the variety of internal and external forces that lead people to become mentally ill. This book explores the answers to these questions that have emerged over time and concludes that current portrayals are not much improved compared to those that emerged thousands of years ago. The puzzles that madness presents are likely to remain unresolved for the foreseeable future and perhaps forever.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a popular diagnosis for America’s problems was that society was becoming a madhouse. In this intellectual and cultural history, Michael E. Staub examines a time when many believed insanity was a sane reaction to obscene social conditions, psychiatrists were agents of repression, asylums were gulags for society’s undesirables, and mental illness was a concept with no medical basis. Madness Is Civilization explores the general consensus that societal ills—from dysfunctional marriage and family dynamics to the Vietnam War, racism, and sexism—were at the root of mental illness. Staub chronicles the surge in influence of socially attuned psychodynamic theories along with the rise of radical therapy and psychiatric survivors' movements. He shows how the theories of antipsychiatry held unprecedented sway over an enormous range of medical, social, and political debates until a bruising backlash against these theories—part of the reaction to the perceived excesses and self-absorptions of the 1960s—effectively distorted them into caricatures. Throughout, Staub reveals that at stake in these debates of psychiatry and politics was nothing less than how to think about the institution of the family, the nature of the self, and the prospects for, and limits of, social change. The first study to describe how social diagnostic thinking emerged, Madness Is Civilization casts new light on the politics of the postwar era.