Passed Down PTSD - A 2nd generation veteran perspective. Guest Post by Diane Van Hook

Rob, one of the main characters in my latest Scholastic novel, ANYTHING BUT OKAY, is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He struggling with PTSD, and in the book we see how it affects the entire family, including his sister Stella.

Starting today, in the lead up to Veteran's Day, I'll be posting a series of pieces about some of the issues our military personnel face when they return from combat.

On Veteran's Day, at 6pm, there will be a random drawing for a set of 10 copies of ANYTHING BUT OKAY for your classroom or book club. You'll get an entry for retweeting this post (please tag me @sarahdarerlitt and hashtag #anythingbutokay) and additional entries for retweeting each of the posts between now and Veteran's Day. Rachel Alpine wrote a great teaching/reading guide, which you can download from my website.


Today I'm happy to welcome Diane Van Hook, veteran and graduate of the low-residency MFA program at WCSU.

I went in to the Army with PTSD.

It wasn’t diagnosed at the time, and wouldn’t be until after I’d already left active duty. I also had depression and anxiety, which continue to this day.
I don’t know of many other service members that sought mental health care while on active duty. I knew I had issues that needed addressing, so for the last two years of active duty, I saw a non-military therapist on post.

But when I left active duty, I didn’t entirely trust Veterans Affairs to help me, especially since my PTSD wasn’t service related.
That had a lot to do with my dad.

I’m a second generation Army veteran, and my father was a Vietnam veteran. Some might say that my mental health issues were an inevitability because his service. It’s a somewhat frequent trope in fiction: the child of veterans from the older wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc) suffering some sort of abuse from the service member. The thing is, Dad’s service wasn’t the issue. At least, it didn’t help the issues that were already there. And it definitely added to them.
The issue was my father’s inability to handle his own mental health issues. There’s no doubt in my mind my father had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Unfortunately, there were far too many sources that contributed to it.

Maybe he couldn’t stand the thought of the stigma for seeking help he obviously needed. Maybe he thought it was a weakness he needed to overcome by himself. I couldn’t tell you, and I couldn’t ask him if I wanted to. He passed away a couple of weeks before I finished Basic Training.
In any case, he’d made his opinion of the VA clear: he didn’t trust them for anything past his yearly physical and sending him his medications. He spent a lot of time disparaging various groups and organizations, but he took care to specify he didn’t trust the mental health personnel.
And despite my efforts in trying to purge myself of the vitriol I’d heard him spew over the years, I couldn’t shake everything. So I carried that residual distrust of the mental health staff when it came time to confront the fact that I had depression and anxiety, and needed to be on medication for them. And instead of seeing a therapist employed by the VA, I chose a civilian one.

And for a few years, the combination of therapy and medication helped.

But as anyone who’s taken any sort of medication long term knows, taking the same dosage over time ceases to be as effective as it once was. When the time came to increase the dosage of my antidepressants, I was required to speak with one of the psychiatric personnel.

In 2010, a few months after I’d initially left active duty and had begun pursuing my degree, I received mobilization orders; in other words, I’d been recalled to active duty. Once I’d reported, I knew I’d need to continue with the therapy I’d started before and I needed to make sure that the higher ups understood why this was a priority for me. The last thing I needed was to get deployed and have an old issue crop up mid-firefight.

A two hour conversation and many tears later, I’d given the mental health Army doctor the truncated version of the series of unfortunate events that had been my life. Needless to say, the physician thought it’d best if I didn’t return to active duty. I received the official diagnosis for depression, the recommendation of therapy, and the orders sending me back home for good.

Flash forward to a year ago, when I was talking to the VA psychiatrist as to why I needed an increase in dosage. At that point, I was well practiced giving the Reader’s Digest version of events, because I didn’t have two hours to spare.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I don’t require nearly as much help as some of the other veterans I’ve become acquainted with over the years. One vet friend, who’d retired from the US Navy and was on disability, had been prescribed meds prescribed that conflicted badly with each other. This affected him so badly that at times he wanted to go to sleep and didn’t want to wake up again.

I lose 22 comrades-in-arms, my camo brothers and sisters to suicide everyday. That fact is beyond a travesty. It’s a shameful stain on the government that branded us their property. We signed a contract, agreeing to sacrifice our time, our families, and our lives in service to our country, with the reciprocation being if something happened to us, we’d be taken care of. But the support system set up to assist us seems to do more harm than good in its dysfunction. And not all of the blame can be laid at the feet of the current administration. They just managed to make a broken system worse.
I’ve been asked in the past how non-military people can help active duty, veterans, and their immediate families. I can’t give a definitive answer because we all differ in our experiences. What would help me probably wouldn’t work for someone else. The best answer I can give is to keep asking the question: how can I help? Ask any veteran you meet that you know needs some sort of assistance.

That might mean lending an ear, a helping hand, a kind word, or something else entirely. Holding responsible those who use veterans as pawns for political gain. Demanding inquiries as to why the standard of care is so abysmal.

The price of freedom isn’t free, and some of us have paid more than others.
But when do we stop paying?
When is it enough?
When are we enough?

Diane Van Hook is a second generation Army veteran recently graduated from Western Connecticut State University with her MFA. She currently resides in Connecticut, and has more books than bookcases. Read her piece Frag Out at Militaryexperience.org.

ANYTHING BUT OKAY pre-order giveaway

My latest YA Novel, ANYTHING BUT OKAY, comes out from Scholastic Press on October 9th.

I'm really excited for this book to come out in the world, and to encourage you to pre-order, I will send you a signed bookmark, a personalized bookplate, and these awesome temporary tattoos to sport when you get involved (and VOTE, if you're old enough!) in the mid-term elections. Unfortunately, I have to make this US and Canada only. Sorry international readers... Pre-order giveaway ends on October 8th.

The temporary tattoos read:

If that's not enough to convince you, for each pre-order entry, I'll make a donation of 5% of your cost of purchase to your choice of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, The League of Women Voters or HIAS.

But wait — there's more! All pre-orders will be entered into a raffle to win copies of IN CASE YOU MISSED IT and BACKLASH.

How do you get this swag? It's easy! Just email me at sdlgiveaways@gmail.com with a proof of purchase and your mailing address.



As with most of my books, the idea for ANYTHING BUT OKAY started with questions that were knocking around my brain.

The first one was inspired by my friend Rob Jordan, a USAF veteran.

Back in December 2014, Rob made a post on Facebook about the problems he had getting disability for the health issues he'd developed as a result of serving in Afghanistan, at bases where there were burn pits. His post made me angry about the way we treat our veterans - I wrote about it here.

Seeing Rob and so many other of our veterans struggle to get help from the Veteran’s Administration after having served our country with pride got me wondering: Why is our country so quick to send troops off to war regardless of the cost, but when our vets come home struggling with the emotional and physical costs of fighting it, the focus is suddenly switched to reducing taxes and a deficit swollen by the costs of prosecuting that war?

I had a write a novel to work that one out, and it's dedicated to Rob.

The second question was “What is a patriot?” and the related question of who gets to define that. I spent fourteen years writing political opinion columns,. and count George Orwell as one of my major influences. Hearing our government using the euphemism “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” for torture was a perfect example of what Orwell warned of in his essay, Politics and the English Language: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” Yet because of the views expressed in my 650-word columns, I was called un-American, and a terrorist lover, which was confusing because I thought I was doing my job as a journalist and my duty as an American.

The news was another inspiration for ANYTHING BUT OKAY. Watching politicians use rhetoric to portray different groups as “animals”, and working to restrict the ability of refugees to seek asylum has a disturbingly familiar ring for someone who grew up in a family with Holocaust trauma. Teachers and librarians described how that rhetoric 'trickled down' to their schools, both virtually on social media and in real life bullying. My heart broke as I heard about students in tears concerned for the safety of their families. I read the news stories about white, privileged kids from the suburbs shouting racist chants when they play teams from schools with a more diverse makeup. This made me wonder how we can help create more understanding and empathy; how we can start conversations and bridge differences. As a white woman of a certain age, I’m learning how many blind spots I have, and I hope reading about Stella and Farida’s friendship will encourage young people to think about what it means to be a good ally; to recognize that we can’t stand by in silence when we see injustice, just because it’s not happening to us personally.

Speaking of the news and how critical it is to learn media literacy skills, particularly in the Internet age, I’ve watched as the number of school librarians and media specialists has been cut by twenty percent since 2000, particularly in predominantly black and Latino districts, despite rising student populations. Technology can be a great tool, but Google will not teach our students media literacy.

I hope that this book will encourage discussion of these questions—and through those conversations enable us to find the humanity we have in common.


To read more about ANYTHING BUT OKAY, here's the link to the book on my website.