Reintegrate Team Update: Living with PTSD
Dexter J. Singleton
Recently I learned that one of the active duty soldiers we interviewed several months ago has lost four military friends in the last few months. Each of them had committed suicide since returning from active duty in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Each of them could no longer make sense of the world around them or their place in it and ended their life. It shook me for many reasons, mainly knowing that so many thousands of young men and women will be returning soon, some possibly facing the same fate. Many will experience symptoms and seek help through family, religion or professional counseling. Many will not. The percentage of soldiers suffering from PTSD will continue to rise as our nation’s pride steps back onto our shores. We hope our production will bring greater awareness to this issue and the stigma of mental health services in our country. These recent events and our initial research helped us create a script that sheds light, asks questions and sparks conversation. Usually it takes more than a year to research, conceive, create and produce a full play. We are doing it in just six months. We plan to use a mix of traditional dialogue, music and film to tell our story. The end result will be a workshop production playing several performances this summer. We will announce dates soon and hope that many of you will join us.
In the meantime, please check out a short presentation of our research and work process on Wednesday June 19th at 5:30pm at the Reintegrate Ideas Talk at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven.
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