Coy, Rachel; Macfarlan, Shane J. (University of Utah)
Faculty Advisor: Macfarlan, Shane (University of Utah, Anthropology)
United States war veterans suffer from a variety of negative outcomes, including suicide and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). These negative outcomes may be due in part to how modern militaries treat moral trauma associated with war — as a transaction leaving warriors with minimal psycho-social support. Scholars have noted many cultures employ post-combat rituals to help reintegrate war veterans back to civilian life and these may be designed to treat PTSD specifically; however, none have ever systematically tested this. We test the hypothesis that post-combat rituals function to mitigate war-induced PTSD by extracting data from the electronic Human Relations Area Files, a repository of digitized ethnographic materials spanning 300 world cultures that are fully searchable by keywords, in conjunction with diagnostic criteria used in the DSM-5. Consistent with diagnostic criteria for PTSD, our analyses reveal that seclusion and sexual abstinence were frequent post-combat rituals (40% and 37.5%, respectively). Interestingly, we find a high prevalence of warrior contamination beliefs following war (80% of cultures). Strangely, food taboos were the most prevalent (42.5%) ritual yet were not represented in the DSM-5 PTSD criteria; this could be explained by comorbid depression affecting warrior's appetites and will be important in future work. These findings were consistent with the view that some war rituals are designed to treat PTSD. However, it appears some rituals have nothing to do with it. This suggests that war rituals may have another purpose such as warriors gaining cultural rewards to help with the transition back to civilian life. I highlight the importance of these findings as 1) an alternative treatment option for veterans suffering from PTSD and 2) as a therapeutic mechanism for reintegrating U.S. soldiers back to civilian life.