Everytime when Lucas talks about having PTSD I have to think of a friend who was a firefighter and was once called to a suicide where a young woman threw herself in front of a train. When he arrived he learned that the woman was someone from his close circle of friends. They were a couple when they were teenagers. She suffered of depression bc she got massively abused by her dad. Dude quit being a firefighter and spiraled down completely bc he got haunted by the images of the smashed body. At some point he couldn't take it anymore and hung himself.
I grew up very rural and lost 4 friends in a car accident. One of them got decapicated in that car crash. A lot of friends and people I knew back then where local firefighters and one was a paramedic who were all called to that crash. These people knew the guys in that car too. Imagine it. Imagine you are a first reponder, you get called to a car crash and you see one of your friends there without his fucking head. And then you see the 3 other bodies and you know them too. I learned from a call that they were dead. I didn't have to see their bodies. But my friends had.
In my 20s I had to deal with cancer and at one point had to stay in hospital for a huge surgery. I shared the room with an guy from the States who was living in Germany and who was an ex-soldier. He told me about what he saw in Afghanistan and what he sometimes had to do. I still remember how he woke up in the nights screaming and sweatting and in complete horror bc of the shit he saw.
A friend of mine decided to become a cop and work up his way there. Dude was an idealist who believed he could make a change and the world become a better place and aimed to become part of the unit who deals with CSAM shit. He joined that unit which took him years to get there but had to quit after a few years and when he became a father himself bc he couldn't take it anymore. All the pictures and videos of little children getting sexually abused and raped he had to look at.
That are people I think of when I hear PTSD being thrown around. I guess there are enough Kiwis here that are my age or older and who also have browsed all the really dark corners of the internet that show(ed) us the gruesome horrors of life. But seeing a video of someone being killed or pictures of a horrible car crash is something completely different to seeing shit in real life, in full real color and when you can smell the blood and death.
Right now there are wars going on, in Ukraine, in Gaza, in whatever where. People are dying in the most horrible ways on all the sides. Getting bombed to ashes, squashed by collapsing buildings, getting crippled, getting shot, getting burned, innocent people who didn't ask for this. Women, kids, old people, people who never joined any fighting forces and who can't fight back or flee. People who signed up for the shit for whatever reasons and regretting their decisions now bc of the horrors they endure. And there is your usual crime going on, everywhere around the world. Humans being horrible abused. Millions of first responders around the world who have to deal with the most horrible crimes and shit one can imagine. People dying in th most horrifying pains imaginable.
And then there is Keffals, crying PTSD bc people on the internet say mean things about him that he doesn't even have to read. He can literally ignore all the shit by simply not engaging with it. He claims PTSD for once waking up with assault rifles pointing in his face, a story Keffals himself changed several times and the cops called bullshit bc they never fucking stormed his troon cave but just knocked at his door and had a conversation with Keffals ex fiance who opened them the door.
I honestly get fucking MATI when I see Lucas crying about PTSD. Keffals is such a completely rotten human being that I have no words for it.
