Mental Illness In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

Returning from battle proves a complicated feat for any soldier. Often enough, veterans come home with mental and physical scars that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. For Vietnam veteran’s, their homecoming became a battle within itself. Soldiers returned home to inadequate knowledge of mental and physical illnesses supplemented with an insufficient amount of care, a hostile society, and an abundance of stereotypes. In the stories, “Speaking of Courage” and “Notes” from Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried, O’Brien emphasizes how America’s new culture affects Norman Bowker’s life when he returns from Vietnam. O’Brien describes how Bowker feels lost at home and how he comes face to face with, “the problem of finding

Doctors particularly struggled to understand mental illnesses, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and their connection to the Vietnam War. Additionally, although the Veterans Administration (VA), an organization created to help care for soldiers, did fund a substantial amount of research to uncover facts about mental illnesses, they initially failed to recognize the Vietnam War as a potential effect, and therefore did not offer treatment services (“VA Research”). When psychiatrist and Vietnam veteran John Talbot evaluated a veteran’s case, he concluded, “He was such a classic case of mental disability related to combat experience” (qtd. Scott 34). It rightfully astounded Talbot when he learned, “this [was] a guy who [had] been disallowed benefits by the VA” since they believed, “he did not have a combat related disorder” (34). Talbot’s patient did not stand alone in the fight to receive necessary care. Since The VA’s protocol claimed that if symptoms occurred a year or more after the war, the VA would not consider it their problem (Scott 36), many soldiers received limited to no aid and few had the finances to pay for private care Their inability to heal from mental wounds disrupted their lives and triggered