Soldiers returning home are faced with a heartbreaking problem most people don't understand

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects an estimated one in 10 Afghanistan veterans and as many as one in five Iraq War veterans. 

But the psychological pain faced by soldiers returning home goes beyond the consequences of experiencing the trauma of war.

Journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger, who spent a year in 2007 embedded with American soldiers at an army outpost that saw some of the heaviest fighting of the Afghanistan war, argues that the unusually high rates of PTSD and emotional distress among American veterans is not simply due to what happens in a war zone.

It's due to the isolated and disconnected society our soldiers are coming home to.

He argues that returning to the individualism and loneliness of Western society makes soldiers desperately miss the sense of connection and closeness they felt with their comrades, and makes it difficult for them to recover from the traumas of war.

During a TED Talk in New York on November 4, Junger told the story of what happened after he returned home to the US from Afghanistan.

For months he found himself experiencing panic attacks, moments of paralyzing fear, and bad dreams: a case of what he calls "short-term PTSD." Symptoms of PTSD -  a poorly understood psychiatric condition that can develop after someone has a traumatizing experience - can include flashbacks, anxiety, depression, and loss of interest in activities a person once enjoyed, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

But it's not just combat veterans who have mental health problems when they return home. Even those who don't see any active combat report symptoms of PTSD, and "non-combat stressors" play a large part in PTSD, a study by the US Navy found.

Junger's theory is that what happens while at war is only part of the issue, and that veterans' problems are compounded by what happens when they return home.

American soldiers are ripped from a tribe-like community where they eat, sleep, and fight together, and then suddenly dropped back into a disconnected one, Junger pointed out. Aside from small family units, we're very isolated from one another. In a 2014 TED Talk, he honed in on alienation as one of the main reasons veterans sometimes miss being at war - a phenomenon that's difficult for civilians to grasp. 

Alienation is not the same as PTSD, but it evokes some of the same feelings of anxiety and depression, Junger said.

There's anthropological evidence that soldiers who return home to a tight-knit community, similar to the one they experienced during war, recover faster than those who return to a more isolated society, Junger said.

For most people, the US is one of those isolated societies, as famously captured by the seminal book "Bowling Alone." As Margaret Talbot wrote in The New York Times, the book describes a country in which "informal ties of all sorts were unraveling, and Americans were becoming an ever more isolated, cynical and anomic lot - detached from civic life, deprived of the social networks that develop when communities are more closely knit."

We don't notice that we live in such a disconnected state because most of us haven't experienced the level of closeness that the military can bring, Junger said. (The military only represents about 1% of the US population.)

But for soldiers who have experienced that closeness, returning home can be a shock. As Junger puts it in an article for Vanity Fair:

The modern soldier returning from combat goes from the kind of close-knit situation that humans evolved for into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good, and people sleep alone or with a partner. Even if he or she is in a family, that is not the same as belonging to a large, self-sufficient group that shares and experiences almost everything collectively. Whatever the technological advances of modern society - and they're nearly miraculous - the individual lifestyles that those technologies spawn may be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.

If we want to protect the mental health of our veterans, Junger argued, we need to fix society first.