Stuck in a trauma-jam: my last newsletter discussed two recent books that documented the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and I will be giving a talk next week at the Attachment, Mentalization, and Psychotherapy Conference, sponsored by McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, on another memoir about trauma, Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know (https://cmecatalog.hms.harvard.edu/attachment-personality-psychotherapy). Foo’s memoir is worth checking out (and will be discussed in my book on memoir and therapy), as it provides a moving description of her history, the diagnosis of complex trauma, and an innovative treatment experiment, where sessions with her relational psychoanalyst were recorded, and both would comment and discuss their interaction in subsequent sessions.[i] While her therapy lasted only three months, it was apparently a success from both the therapist and patient’s standpoint.
If only the treatment of trauma were always so successful. In this month’s newsletter, I will focus on a man named Ian Fishback whose story leads us to the top of the mountain only then to tumble down to the base. Our successes merit celebration, but, of course, we can and should also learn when things do not go so well. My aim is to create a space to contemplate the admirable, sad, and complicated life of Ian Fishback.
Mary Louise Kelly, the host of NPR’s All Things Considered provides an excellent, succinct summary:
Ian Fishback was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery
yesterday. Fishback was an Army veteran who deployed four
times to Iraq and Afghanistan. He was also named one of Time
magazine's most influential people for blowing the whistle on
torture by the U.S. military. And despite being hailed as a real-life
Captain America, Fishback died broke, virtually homeless and
in court-mandated mental health care
Fishback was a star athlete and excellent student from a small town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He graduated from West Point and then served in special forces as well as in the 82nd airborne division of the army. He became a whistleblower after writing a letter of concern in 2005 to Senators John McCain and John Warner, Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which kicked off an investigation and legislation to prevent detainee abuse. McCain honored Fishback’s integrity: “I thank God every day that we have men and women the caliber of Captain Fishback serving in our military.”
Fishback’s testimony constituted a stiff rebuttal to Defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld’s claim that the abuse of detainees from the so-called “Global War Against Terror” was not widespread, just the conduct of a few bad apples. The purpose of Fishback’s letter was to seek acknowledgement of the “tragedy” that occurred in the absence of clear orders, and it also documents the many (failed) efforts that he made to get attention to this issue before McCain took it up.
One of the most compelling aspects of Fishback’s letter is his concern, not just for the victims, but also for the perpetrators of abuse. As he states:
We owe our soldiers better than this. Give them a clear standard that is in accordance with the bedrock principles of our nation. Some do not see the need for this work. Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda's, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
This is an electrifying affirmation of what it means to be an honorable soldier and human being, especially in the face of temptations to deviate from that path.
Fishback dwells on the harm that we as Americans have done unto ourselves. Although it can be argued that we have always fallen short of the standards set forward in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, Fishback is on firm ground in worrying about our ideals becoming further jeopardized. His argument reminds me of Simone Weil’s interpretation of Homer’s Iliad that the exercise of force has a destructive effect on the perpetrator, not just on the victim.[ii] The grandiosity that has characterized our recent leadership might be construed as a defensive response stemming, in part, from a sense of humiliation (concerning the revelations about the torture scandal), which occurred in the aftermath of 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the letter, Fishback also takes a clear stand against torture. Keep in mind that his eye-witness testimony is from 2005—evidence that the American Psychological Association (APA) managed to ignore, before taking a belated, firmer stance against torture in 2013. Details of the conduct of the APA during throughout this time is too large a topic to pursue here, but Fishback’s testimony certainly puts into doubt whether the presence of psychologists contributed to halting unethical behavior, as the PENS committee hoped might be the case.[iii] It goes without saying, too, that it is particularly disturbing that the Office of Ethics itself was compromised by its involvement with the Department of Defense, according to the findings of the Hoffman Report, an investigation commissioned by the APA itself.[iv] While the APA has taken some steps to rectify its stance on torture, it remains the case that a large organization of mental health professionals failed to take seriously the warnings issued by Fishback and others and ended up bringing shame on itself. (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/report-says-american-psychological-association-collaborated-on-torture-justification.html).
For Fishback, the choice not to allow security to override our ideals is crucial and requires courage. In his own words:
Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security?
Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom
and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist
threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront
danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our
courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the
prospect of sacrifice?” (Here is the letter in its entirety:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2005/09/28/a-matter-of-
honor/e991047a-f780-4921-b3b5-a51e84735833/?no_nav=true).
One might hope that Fishback’s defense of the challenge of adhering to our ideals under duress would garner enduring appreciation.
The story of our tragedy becomes manifest in the tragedy that befell Fishback. His whistleblowing, predictably, was not greeted with enthusiasm in the military, and he ended up deciding to leave the service. He received an MA and eventually a PhD from the Philosophy department at the University of Michigan with a dissertation on just war (https://iep.utm.edu/justwar/), and he taught for several years at West Point. Fishback won a Fulbright fellowship to go to Sweden to work for a human rights organization (and applied for citizenship with the European Union) but returned to the US after feeling depressed. Despite his academic achievements, his life took a decided turn for the worse. He became paranoid and was disruptive in public settings, despite being deemed ineligible for coverage by the VA. He died at the age of 42 years old in an adult foster care facility on November 23, 2021. In his obituary in the New York Times, it is suggested that he was suffering from neurological problems or PTSD (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/us/ian-fishback-dead.html).
Not long after his death, Fishback was the subject of article in the magazine section of the New York Times by C.J. Chivers on February 21, 2023, which documented the process of his demise, beginning with his arrest for creating a public disturbance, and the police description of him as a “Potentially Violent Person” (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/magazine/ian-fishback.html). Chivers is empathic about what he terms Fishback’s “mercilessly advancing mental illness,” which was never diagnosed properly, no less treated. Although I would be cautious about ascribing inevitability to Fishback’s mental condition, I appreciate that Chivers adopts the wisdom of hindsight in order to trace and underscore the many failed steps that prevented Fishback from getting the help that he needed. The saga of his multiple diagnoses makes for humbling reading, and in the end Fishback refused further care.
Chivers supplies critical background information, like that Fishback’s father served in Vietnam but became disillusioned, joining Vietnam Vets Against the War. His parents both became peace advocates. They divorced when Fishback was in the 4th grade, and his mother opposed his decision to join the military, fearing how it might affect him. Friends describe both his ascetic and idealistic tendencies as a young man. It does not seem that he exhibited any signs of mental illness prior to his whistleblowing, according to the information that I read. He weathered several tours of duty but became increasingly frustrated by the mistrust he encountered after his whistleblowing. Like many other soldiers, adjusting to life back home proved to be extremely difficult; unlike other soldiers, Fishback had to deal with the extra pain of being rejected by a group with whom he had powerfully identified. It is not very surprising to hear that he developed paranoid ideas about the government monitoring his activities.
The final stages of Fishback’s life make for heartbreaking reading—a nightmarish combination of poor and ineffectual treatment on the part of local clinics and hospitals, and the VA. In a recent article about Fishback’s burial at Arlington Cemetery (also by Chivers), Dennis McDonough, the secretary of the VA, is quoted as acknowledging that the VA failed in its responsibilities to him (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/us/ian-fishback-army-burial-arlington-cemetery.html).
The sadness of Fishback’s story should not override the importance of his actions. According to his father, Fishback understood himself as a defender of the rule of law. We can predict that it is likely that there will be opportunities for fellow defenders of the law to put themselves on the line, as Fishback did, in the not-so-distant future.
Judith Herman’s new book, Trauma and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (2023) makes an argument that is especially relevant to Fishback and that also is challenging for mental health professionals to entertain.[v] According to Herman, based on her many years of experience, what trauma survivors wish for and need is recognition from a moral community. She presents a variety of examples of what might point in this direction, such as restorative justice practices (https://law.wisc.edu/fjr/rjp/justice.html#:~:text=Restorative%20justice%20seeks%20to%20examine,to%20repair%20the%20harm%20done). Herman’s point of view is germane to Fishback in that what he lacked and what he sorely needed was a moral community to acknowledge his experience, his suffering, and the justice of his cause. The fact that no such thing occurred is a statement about our society at this moment in time.
Does a moral community even exist in the larger society? On the surface, it seems that our larger community is divided into two: either we have two different moral communities or, more provocatively, one honest one and another corrupt one. There is, without question, slippage in the consensus that a general moral community exists in our society. Yet, does it really need to be a matter of contention between the right and the left to regard Fishback as an embodiment of our cherished ideals?
There is a vexing question lurking behind Herman’s view of trauma: whether any individual treatment could fully address Fishback’s suffering. Herman appreciates that trust, mutuality and reciprocity can be incorporated into individual work, but she argues that if trauma is a social phenomenon, a socially sanctioned input is necessary. As far as I can tell, it does not seem that Fishback encountered mental health professionals who shared such a social understanding of trauma. I was saddened to read that at the time of his death a GoFundMe campaign was organized on Fishback’s behalf to send him to the Austen Riggs Center. Too bad this did not happen.
Recognition came too late for Ian Fishback. We can honor his memory by remembering what he did, what he endured, and we can hope that his example might inspire others to take a stand in the face of injustice. Postulating such well-meaning intentions is easy; yet Fishback’s tale is a somber reminder of the reality that truth-telling often comes with a heavy, personal cost. Moral heroism cannot be expected from everyone; it is rare, and perhaps even requires an unusual kind of personality, one that is uncompromising, relentlessly determined, and refuses to retreat from self-sacrifice.
[i] S. Foo (2022). What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (New York: Ballantine).
[ii] S. Weil (1939/1956). The Iliad or The Poem of Force (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill).
[iii] The Presidential Task Force on Ethics and National Security (PENS) committee was a task force created by the APA in 2005 and was composed of 6/9 people with military affiliations.
[iv] Here is the New York Times article on the Hoffman report: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us/psychologists-shielded-us-torture-program-report-finds.html. And here is a more interpretive version: https://kspope.com/kpope/Hoffman.php.
[v] J. Herman (2023). Trauma and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice (New York: Basic).
Thank you for writing and sharing your story. I would be happy to receive a review copy of your book.
Thank you for this article, I found it harrowing to read and a complete tragedy for such an heroic soul. We are currently struggling with our own family trauma of severe mental illness and taking a critical look at services here in the UK which are very poor and generally only medication based....although holding out hope for Open Dialogue practices.... I also agree on the fact that many people with severe mental illness, my young son included, are heroic in their moral stances; mine refused to be released from private prison where he was held on remand for 4 months of complete isolation and deprivation whilst florid, starving himself and refusing to self care because he would not plead guilty to a charge (relatively minor) which he did not commit. Although vastly different in scale the stand out similarity is the brave soul that, as you say, are so rare and willing to make great sacrifices for what they believe in despite deprivations that no human should have to endure...it is no wonder the mind breaks under the pressure of isolation, marginalisation and stigma....they are truly Saints.