Gulf War Syndrome: Is It Psycholiogial or Physiological

Gulf War Syndrome: Is It Physiological, Or Psychological?

What is Gulf War Syndrome (GWS)? Is it a debilitating physical condition because of a secret use of chemical and biological warfare from the Iraqis? Is it post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted from the Gulf War? Nobody really knows the truth behind GWS, but many people have given their expertise and opinions on what, if anything caused GWS. In Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, written by Elaine Showalter, she gives her account of GWS as "an epidemic of suspicion, a plague of paranoia that threatens a greater malaise than even Vietnam." (143) It is true that GWS could be a case of paranoia or suspicion, but the physical symptoms and the transferring of symptoms from one person to the next just does not add up. It can be derived from evidence that GWS seems to be linked to chemical exposure.

This illness can be thought of as being caused two different ways, physiological and psychological. The physiological explanation makes no sense to me. It might be hard to believe that roughly 60,000 war veterans have this mysterious illness that causes many pains and defects to the body and it has not been identified by doctors or scientists. Doctors cannot seem to find anything wrong with these patients, except that some of the symptoms resemble post-traumatic stress disorder. Post-traumatic stress disorder places a tremendous amount of stress on the body, and it can cause physical ailments such as a rash, loss of sleep, or headaches. These symptoms resemble the symptoms of GWS.

In her discussion about GWS, Showalter really did not give any proof to back up her claim that it is a psychological ailment. She more or less made a joke out of the physiological aspect of the claim. It is hard to believe or take sides with a certain issue when the author offers no proof and mocks the opposing argument. Obviously, she cannot see the other side of the argument because she is a one-tracked mind type of person. She wrote a book about what she thinks is a series of hysterical illnesses that was caused by an affliction of the mind and is expressed through a disturbance of the body. I am not discounting all of her arguments, and I do believe the mind plays some role in this, and other types of illnesses, but the evidence is stacked against her in her discussion about Gulf War Syndrome.

There are two main scenarios on how GWS originated. Both of these scenarios are a direct and indirect result of chemical and biological weapons. The first is the plain and simple fact that there were chemical and biological weapons in Iraq during the war. Iraq has a long history of using these weapons. They admitted to using mass amount of chemical weapons against their neighboring country of Iran in 1983 all the way until the Gulf War. Even though Saddam Hussein gave his word that chemical and biological weapons were not used, who is going to trust the word of a dictatorial leader like Hussein? According to the New York Times, soldiers who manned the most sophisticated mobile chemical-detection equipment reported that chemical weapons were found in Kuwait during the war and their reports were largely ignored or dismissed by their superiors. Our own government even admitted that some of the Iraqi weapons bunkers that were blown up by U.S. soldiers contained chemical weapons unbeknownst to them at the time.(2)

The second scenario is an indirect result of the chemical and biological weapons. I am speaking of the drugs that were given to the soldiers to protect against nerve gas attacks, and to ward off bugs. Showalter mentions in her argument that the insect repellent that was used can cause the same symptoms as that in GWS when mixed with one or two of the other drugs that were used to protect against nerve gas. A study called the Abou-Donia study tested chickens with the three chemicals that made up the insect repellent and the nerve gas repellent. In the chickens, any single one of these chemicals did not do any harm. But any two of them combined did cause neurotoxicity, and all three produced the most toxicity of all.(26) The authors of the study wrote that concentrations of these chemicals in the nervous system caused neuropathologic effects. This leaves them to believe that a well-meaning effort to protect the U.S. troops against insect-borne diseases and nerve gas might have backfired and contributed to the Gulf War Syndrome.

This theory would certainly explain the psychological effects that resemble PTSD. These effects and their resemblance to PTSD are one of the angles to Showalter's argument. She thinks of the syndrome merely as stress that was suffered by the soldiers because they as had the thought of chemical and biological weapons on their mind. If it is only stress how does she explain the soldier's semen burning the skin of his partner when it comes in contact? How does she explain people in contact with the soldiers contracting the syndrome? Is it possible to transfer a syndrome when it is merely a figment of the soldier's