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Life

Don't call stressed out soldiers crazy

By Paula J. Caplan

14 November 2007

“I THINK I must be crazy,” said Julia, an Iraq war veteran. “At a welcome-home ceremony, I didn’t know they were going to fire cannons. I was holding a bottle of champagne, and when they fired and fired and fired, I went nuts. I hurled the bottle at a tree, stuck my head between my knees, and shook until it stopped. Crazy, right?”

As a psychologist, I know most people will end their sessions by saying something like “Crazy, right?” But veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars say this with a particularly disturbing intensity. Their degree of anguish and…

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