Some days are filled with pain and sorrow. And some days you find out about a great organization like Puppies Behind Bars, an organization in New York that puts dogs into New York state prisons for a year to be specially trained by prisoners as service dogs for law enforcement and the disabled.

Puppies Behind Bars has recently begun a special program for U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars brought down by combat stress. The dogs are taught special commands so that they can act as buffers between their people and other human beings when the vets are experiencing difficult times. Coloradoan.com tells a story about a vet who is already getting the benefit of a puppy’s love:

In addition to the usual “shake” or “sit,” Samba and Frankie also know how to get in front of strangers ready to approach Hill or Bang-Knudsen. The dogs act as buffers, particularly when the two men aren’t ready to open up about what’s bothering them. The dogs clearly also provide much-needed companionship.

“When (the owner) begins to feel anxious, we teach them to let that anxiety go down their arms and into their hands. They can then pet their dogs, and the anxiety can go straight into the dogs,” said Bayless.

…This week alone, he says he’s already started to notice a difference. His wife has already told him when he’s around the dog he reminds her “of the person she married.”

I love this program, not just for what it does for my fellow sufferers but for what it does for the prisoners as well. From the Puppies Behind Bars web site:

Not only do inmates have unlimited time to spend with the puppies, but they benefit from the responsibility of being puppy raisers in ways that are especially important to their rehabilitation: they learn patience, what it is like to be completely responsible for a living being, how to give and receive unconditional love, and — since puppy raisers take classes and train the dogs together — how to work as a team.

Make a donation to Puppies Behind Bars

Research done by the Department of Defense on the physical mechanisms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are beginning to bear fruit. Research presented at the Warrior Resilience Conference in November by Dr. Steven Southwick, deputy director of the clinical neurosciences division of the National Center for PTSD, has demonstrated how the chronic, unremitting stress experienced by PTSD sufferers damages the complex neurological system that regulates our response to stress. 

One of the key misperceptions about stress, something also commonly misperceived about allergies, is that exposed people build tolerances to what they are exposed. Nothing could be further from the truth. Increased exposure to stress does not build up some kind of super muscle so that the next time you experience stress, you can combat it like Wonder Woman. It actually breaks down the mechanism so that you over-react to the stress, the same mechanism that happens when you are over-exposed to an allergen. The allergen strips your ability to fight against it, and the next time you are actually more sensitive, and more sensitive, until you are hyper-sensitive.

Here’s what happens: Animals, who only experience physical stress, can easily turn off their stress response when the cause of stress has passed on. But humans can feel stress from thoughts and feelings, as well as physical threats. The experience of unremitting stress activates your “fight or flight” response, pushing out increased levels of cortisol and noreprinephrine. Dr. Southwick’s research has shown that PTSD sufferers push out excess cortisol, impairing the hippocampus’ ability to regulate it and turn off the cortisol, causing even more cortisol to be produced in a vicious cycle. Next thing you know, you’re pacing, or rocking, and pulling your hair out (or whatever anxiety actions you take, those being mine).

Noreprinephrine, or NE, is the hormone that regulates arousal. In Dr. Southwick’s terms:

“NE helps humans selectively attend to those stimuli in their environment that are critical for survival. It’s also important for vigilance and cardiovascular response. It’s a critical part of the alarm system in my brain… . NE can become sensitized, so that the next time a stressor comes along, an individual releases more stress hormone [than is really needed],” Dr. Southwick explained.

Hence, the car alarm goes off, and we jump ten feet in the air.

There is hope. Southwick and his colleagues have identified soldiers with high resiliency against stress to have high levels of an amino acid known as NPY. NPY is released with NE when the sympathetic nervous system is activated. NPY inhibits the continued release of NE so that the sufferer doesn’t “overshoot” NE, causing the person to be hyper-aroused for extended periods of time.

Identifying something like this could be one more small step to finding effective treatment therapies not only for people with combat and serious injury PTSD, but complex PTSD like mine.