When I delivered my victim impact statement after Maxwell's sentencing, I nearly shouted. I talked about my emotional health, my physical health, how this derailed my life. I wanted to project my voice so that no one in that courtroom could ignore what I was saying.
A whole vocabulary of mediaspeak terms applied to real life has gradually emerged. Included here, among others, are: collateral damage, neutralized, canceled, surgical strike, playbook, rules of the game, high-value target, and gamechanger.
Flashbulb memories are memories that are affected by our emotional state. Your brain takes a snapshot when the ground shifts under your feet, and that snapshot includes everything—the smell of coffee going cold in your cup holder, the static on the radio, the way your hands suddenly felt too heavy.
The concept album is a response to the brutal murder of Breedlove's father and stepmother at the hands of his stepbrother. The frame—the first song and the last—of the album is about the murders and their aftermath. But this is not a true crime record.
Maryna, the main heroine of Twenty One, has only one wish that her soldier husband Petro comes back alive. She frantically raises tens of thousands of dollars online to buy drones, weapons and power generators for the front line.
"It does indeed seem to be very appealing to a wider public to conduct their own online research," says historian Johannes Spohr. "But, in Germany, these sources have actually been accessible at the Federal Archives since 1994. And there, one can actually obtain much more information than just about these memberships."
Hibuki, the stuffed animal dog, allows children to project their feelings, helping them to express emotions like sadness and anxiety. The child becomes the caretaker of the dog, which facilitates self-soothing.
There is nothing more dangerous than an enforced disappearance. Think about the word for a moment: disappearance. Imagine waking up to find that a relative has vanished without a trace, or that you've been torn away from your family with no explanation. When you're disappeared, anything can happen to you, from verbal humiliation to physical torture or even death.
With millions of soldiers estimated to be suffering from trauma-related conditions, not to mention civilians, Ukraine faces an urgent question: How will it treat the lasting mental scars of war? Among the emerging possibilities is psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) in treatment of war-related trauma, a controversial yet increasingly researched approach that some experts believe could play a transformative role in veteran mental health care.
Excellent descriptions of trauma abound, including memoirs, but they are logical and descriptive, constrained by the conventions of straightforward narrative. But trauma itself upends the usual modes of narrative by which we think about our lives: out of sequence and unintegrated, traumatic memories defy the logic that guides our sense of our lives as stories with a past, present, and future. Literary tools such as symbol, allegory, and narrative structure can embody a visceral sense of the ways that trauma can disrupt and diminish a life.
"My mother and sisters were killed on that day. For 26 years, I have not known where their bodies are buried. Every time I see a pit, I think they might be lying there," Gashi says. For more than two decades, he has been haunted by the feeling that the truth could lie right beneath his feet, but remains out of reach.
On the table are photos from another time: young men in uniform, barely older than 20, with serious expressions on their faces. Haxhimusa runs his fingers over one of the pictures. "That was us," he says quietly. The 58-year-old ethnic Albanian was once a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, an ethnic Albanian separatist militia that fought against the Serbian police and the Yugoslav Army in the Kosovo War at the end of the 1990s.
For many veterans, returning home marks not resolution but the beginning of a quieter struggle. Despite decades of innovation in trauma-focused therapies and medication, a substantial number continue to live with psychological injuries that existing treatments only partly address. Their trauma is not merely a cluster of symptoms; it is a disruption of identity, moral coherence, and belonging. It reflects lived experience often shaped by early adversity, military culture, and the potentially socially isolating aftermath of service.
'They're dead.' In disbelief, my response was unfiltered. 'What?' Followed by the F word. A wave of emotion rushed through me. My chest tightened. My body went cold. I could not immediately find the words to offer condolences, not because I did not feel them deeply, but because inside, my many parts were experiencing a collective shock. When you live with dissociative identity disorder (DID), news like this does not land in one place. It ricochets across all parts within.
