30. November 2009 by David Julen, Pastor, First Baptist Cramerton (copied from Biblical Recorder online edition--you are encouraged to see their coverage of pastor suicide and Snyder Memorial family tragedy {Fayetteville businessman kills self, 2 children, and wife}).
When I learned in September of the death of a North Carolina pastor by his own hand I was reminded of how often I have dealt with Christians who believed only the weak willed and less devout dealt with depression and emotional breakdown.
It brought to mind an article in American Heritage magazine several years ago by John Appel.
Appel was a highly respected psychiatrist at Yale and received the Legion of Merit for his work in military psychiatry during World War II.
In the article he related how he and a team of psychiatrists were given the task of developing a method to determine which soldiers would ultimately break down because of combat stress and weed them out before they broke.
Prevailing Army wisdom was that the soldiers who broke down in combat were neurotics and weaklings. Yet Appel’s research showed that every man has a breaking point.
Every man who is exposed to enough extreme stress for a long enough period of time will become a psychiatric casualty.
Appel said this is now accepted in the military but is still hardly common knowledge, and it has tremendous implications for understanding social structure and human nature.
Appel noted that one of the places where this breaking point began to be clearly shown was in the Mediterranean theater of operations — North Africa and Italy.
In some places infantry rifle battalions had casualty rates of 1,200 to 1,500 per thousand per year.
Following such intense action, division psychiatrists reported a sharp rise in what they began to call the “old sergeants syndrome.”
Veterans with multiple stripes on their arms and medals on their chest were coming in as psychiatric cases at a far greater rate than new men.
This tracked with data from other theaters that pointed toward the fact that those who had broken down were not weaker but had been in the crucible of combat the longest.
The end result of their research was that by 214 aggregate days of combat duty (as I understand this, not tours of duty but days in combat), all men had broken down psychologically — that is, if they had not been wounded, killed, or lost to physical sickness.
Based on his data Appel asked Gen. George Marshal to recommend a limit of 180 aggregate days of combat duty.
The number who had survived that long was so small Appel noted that the loss of manpower involved would be acceptably slight and the Army adopted his recommendation.
The fact that everyone has a breaking point may be accepted in the military but it is often unaccepted in our Christian culture. In the abnormal extreme stress of combat the breaking point is exhibited by men who can barely function.
They are jittery, overly cautious, often possessing the “thousand yard stare” — broken men who simply stare off in the distance almost unable to function. In normal activities of life the breaking point may be when one is unable to balance stress from earning a living, dealing with family, sickness, pain and grief, finances, and perhaps a genetic predisposition toward depression.
Appel’s realization that every man has a breaking point is not held in common belief.
We often still operate under the assumption that only the weak need emotional help.
Recently in the Biblical Recorder, Steve Scoggin, president of the counseling agency CareNet, said, “We create an environment that makes it hard to admit our humanity.”
Appel’s report to Gen. Marshall led to a decision to change the environment for infantrymen.
I believe that we as Christians need to begin to change the environment in which we function by recognizing everyone has a breaking point, including the most devout.
This should be an extension of our foundational doctrine that we still retain a sinful nature that is not removed when we accept Christ as our Savior. (1 John 1:8-10, Gal. 5:17, etc.) Adopting a limited amount of time in combat gave men hope for a way out. Hope is in the DNA of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Psalms echo this theme of hope in God even when current circumstances are unchanged.
The New Testament speaks over and over of help and hope for the afflicted and hurting that are believers (Romans 8:18, 12:12). As ministers we often are called to be present in difficult circumstances where there are no easy answers. Our inadequacies can feed our hopelessness.
I often recall the words of my teacher Wayne Oates who cited 2 Cor. 2:15-16 — “We are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing … Who is sufficient for these things?”
We are often called to simply be the reminder there is a greater power at work. We are reminders of the presence of God. We are not God.
We all have our breaking point because we are all broken and in need of God’s help.
Victor Frankl wrote "Man's Search for Meaning" after his experience in the Nazi Concentration Camps.
ReplyDeleteJust like the study above, Frankl wrote of those prisoners who lost their hope and any sense of meaning. Within a few days they would lie on their cot, turn their face toward the wall cutting off all socialization = within a few days they would each one be dead!