Article July 23, 2007 Issue

SPIRITUAL ANSWERS TO THE STRESS OF WAR

JANET HORTON

JANET HORTON served for 28 years as a Christian Science chaplain in the United States Army. In a recent live Internet chat on spirituality.com, she responded to questions from site visitors about how prayer can address challenges that soldiers are currently facing in combat. Here are some of the questions and her answers. To listen to the full chat, which includes several examples of how people have applied Christian Science within a military context, go to www.spirituality.com/chats/horton.

How can you help someone who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of experiences in combat?

What the studies have shown—and one that impressed me very much is from The Washington Post of September 6, 2002, about a year after 9/11—is that many of the psychological techniques were not helpful. But the bottom-line conclusion was that most people were very resilient and that you could expect normal recovery.

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