Coming Home From War: PTSD May Not Tell the Full Story

… we keep focusing on trauma, PTSD. But for a lot of these people, maybe it’s not trauma. I mean, certainly, soldiers are traumatized and the ones who are have to be treated for that. But a lot of them – maybe what’s bothering them is actually a kind of alienation. (Junger, TED Talk, 2015)

The quote above is from Sebastian Junger, an American journalist and author who has reported from conflict zones in Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East. It comes from his 2015 TED Talk, which has attracted more than 1.4 million views.

Junger's talk is a personal narrative of what he experienced after returning from Afghanistan, which is commonly regarded as PTSD, although he disputes this term. A reader sent it to me, and I was glad she did. I watched the talk several times and although I do not agree with him on every point, I find most of it compelling.

Junger was right to point out that what veterans battle with when they return home from a war zone may extend beyond PTSD or trauma. For many veterans, the resources available to support their PTSD often appear insufficient. This is evident in the high rate of suicide among veterans in both the UK and the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ 2025 report, 6,398 veterans died by suicide in 2023, an average of more than 17 deaths every day.

Junger also might be right that sometimes it is not what ex-soldiers have seen in war zones that torments them most and leads to many of them killing themselves, but what they experience upon returning. This relates to what a report in The Guardian observed: Veterans are “damaged [more] not by a traumatic event, but by the shock of returning from war.” It also connects to the idea that some people can come home only to discover that the home they left behind no longer exists in the same way; the emotional and social world that once made it feel like home is no longer available to them.

Junger’s suggestion was that the ‘alienation’ veterans suffer at home could be the result of their separation from the ‘tribe’ of their fellow soldiers. In my view, they are ‘alienated’ not just because they experience severe loneliness but because they cognitively remain in the war zone even though physically they have returned home.

This is what I call cognitive immobility—a state in which a person remains emotionally tied to a past life or experience even though their circumstances have changed. In this state they realise, sadly, that ‘… no home is truly a home; even the previous home – the ancestral home – has lost its distinguishing features and allure’ (Olumba, 2023, p.782).

PTSD vs. ‘Post-deployment alienation disorder’

Another comment of Junger's which captured my attention is that PTSD perhaps is the wrong term for what ex-soldiers who return from war experience.

I mean, maybe we just have the wrong word for some of it, and just changing our language, our understanding, would help a little bit: “Post-deployment alienation disorder”. Maybe even just calling it that for some of these people would allow them to stop imagining trying to imagine a trauma that didn’t really happen in order to explain a feeling that really is happening. And in fact, it’s an extremely dangerous feeling. That alienation and depression can lead to suicide. These people are in danger. It’s very important to understand why. (Junger, TED Talk, 2015)

Junger’s proposal was to replace the term PTSD with one like ‘Post-deployment alienation disorder’, to capture not just the trauma but also the ‘alienation’ he alluded to, while PTSD is a mental health condition which describes what persons who have experienced or witnessed a terrifying or life-threatening event go through.

In my view, Junger’s term is too narrow to capture what goes on with anyone who has witnessed or lived through an experience that needs to be recorded deep in their memory. Emotionally charged experiences stay with us because we draw on that experience to survive similar situations in the future (Charan Ranganath, 2024).

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The PTSD diagnosis has its purpose, but what the militaries of the USA, UK and other countries need to consider is differentiating between ex-soldiers ‘… who are haunted by memories of war but live in the present cognitively and those whose minds have never really left the battlefield, even after they receive effective treatment for PTSD’.

Those who live cognitively in the present may not long for their former military life, while others may wish to return to the war zone. This difference could lie in what persists and how it persists. With PTSD, people may live in the present while repeatedly re-experiencing traumatic events. With cognitive immobility, however, their cognitive and emotional orientation may remain anchored to their former military life.

Having that understanding may help us recognise the challenges that ex-soldiers face that do not fit neatly within familiar labels such as PTSD. Therefore, veterans who have received treatment for PTSD but still feel ‘alienated’ or unable to cognitively leave the war zone would then be given support that would help them live in the present. This is what we should be researching now in order to give them that support.

Final Thoughts

I agree with Junger that veterans living with what he describes as ‘post-deployment alienation disorder’ may be vulnerable to suicide, but I believe cognitive immobility may also help us understand what some of them are experiencing.

However, this experience is not confined to those returning from war. People going through heartbreak, divorce, imprisonment, bereavement, or displacement from their homeland or family may experience something similar. These are huge disruptions in life that someone may not have full control over.

Healing may begin when we recognise that present distress is not always just about what happened to us but also about the difficulty of cognitively moving from what was to what is.

If we are to support people through such transitions, we may need, as Junger urged, to look beyond PTSD and consider not only why the mind can remain stuck in the past, but also what might help release it from the past into the present.