Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding how neuroscience is changing the relationship between the state and US veterans with war disabilities

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are the signature injuries of the recent US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such injuries pose difficulties in transitioning to civilian life and long-term challenges for veterans and their families. Veterans with war-acquired disabilities constitute a population needing immediate and long-term social, vocational, and medical support. Knowledge of how veterans understand and use biomedical and neuroscientific research can enhance communication between scientists, clinicians, and veterans, and also promote improved scientific and health literacy on mTBI and PTSD. This project also aims to document veterans' unmet needs, while collaboratively identifying solutions among key stakeholders in veteran care. Finally, this study hopes to aid clinical and social understandings of the individual and deeply personal meanings attached to a diagnostic category as it moves between the bench of basic science research and the bedside of clinical practice. The results of this research will be shared with military and healthcare professionals, and among anthropologists and other social scientists interested in studies of war trauma, neuroscience, veteran health, and disability. The project also will provide for the training of an MD-PhD graduate student in anthropology. Mobilized by the need to better care for returning veterans, the US Government, clinicians, scientists, and soldiers have increasingly turned to the neurosciences to provide insights into these war-acquired disabilities. Jennifer Baldwin, under the supervision of Dr. Jane Desmond of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will explore the emergent meanings produced by neurscientific research, and the effect of this new knowledge on how veterans, clinicians, and researchers at Veteran Affairs (VA) hospitals understand the different types of traumas with which veterans are suffering. This project employs participant-observation, interview, and community health methodologies to evaluate: a) What role do evolving neuroscientific knowledge and technologies play in transforming understandings of PTSD and mTBI for clinicians, neuroscience researchers, and veterans? b) Are research developments in the neurosciences changing how veterans diagnosed with these conditions characterize themselves, their conditions, and their life goals? And if so, how? c) What do neuroscientific explanations of war-acquired brain/mind traumas allow and disavow with regards to veterans' own understandings of their experiences at war and upon homecoming? and d) How does the use of neuroscientific knowledge and techniques by VA clinical and research spaces influence the relationship between these veterans and the state? This research contributes to the study of medical and cultural anthropology by analyzing how recent neuroscientific research on PTSD and mTBI is transforming how the state cares for returning veterans, as well as clinical, social, and veterans' perspectives about the effects of violence, trauma, and war. This study thus contributes broader insight into the relationship between medical authority, state power, and new forms of citizenship that emerge and are negotiated in VA clinical spaces.