A non-age related concern about McCain

While just about everyone knows that John McCain was a POW during the Vietnam War, other elements of his military background are less well known. Writing in last week's Phoenix, Mary Ann Sorrentino says that the senator's mental state should be more of a concern than his age.

The more than 1500 pages detailing McCain’s medical information do not dispel the notion that the candidate’s notorious temper may be related to his more than five years in a Vietnam prison camp. Reporting on his health in May, the New York Times noted how McCain’s doctors called him robust. The end of the story also noted: “As a prisoner of war, Mr. McCain told doc-tors, he had tried to commit suicide twice. But by 1977, he said he had ‘all but forgotten the traumas of captivity.’ ”

Yet Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) — which is diagnosed in one of eight veterans returning from the hell that is Iraq — did not appear in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, seven years after McCain’s release from Hanoi. Anger and depression are two key symptoms of PTSD.

Much has been said about the government’s failure to provide veterans with the medical help they need. The New England Journal of Medicine reports that only 23 percent to 40 percent of soldiers suffering from PTSD seek help because of the stigma the military attaches to psychiatric treatment.

In John McCain: An American Odyssey (Free Press, 2007) author Robert Timberg (who knows, the candidate has said, “more about me than I do”) calls McCain’s legendary rages “out of all proportion to the provocation.” He has also cited the sound of jangling keys as a trigger for McCain’s POW-related nightmares.

Columnist Sidney Blumenthal has quoted McCain as calling colleagues “asshole” and “fucking jerk” on the Senate floor. Even if this were considered “normal” behavior, it would be difficult to classify it as “presidential.”

As with Hillary Clinton’s red telephone commercial, all this raises a question: if the call comes at 3 am, do voters want the awakened president to be prone to disproportionate rages or trauma associated with jangling keys?