When Killing is a Job: PITS And PTSD Are Related And Pretty Horrendous
By: Christyl Rivers
Tags: Life Lessons, Animals, Food, PTSD, Mental Health

Perpetrator Induced Trauma Stress and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can kill, but solutions are arriving, along with more choices

Grass fed cows are one solution to human suffering Christyl Rivers

Killing is hard on humans

PITS means Perpetrator Induced Trauma Stress. It is related to, and often manifests along with the better known PTSD. It is an illness caused by killing.

It is usually the vulnerable that we ask to do “the dirty work.”

There is plenty of debate about undocumented immigrants and even legal ones. But one aspect remains true and non-disputed. Immigrants do take the jobs others don’t want, among these jobs are meat processing.

These are people more desperate and discriminated against than most American born workers. It remains a fact that in some highly undesirable jobs, like butchering and processing animals, most employees are black and brown.

Offering choice is a major factor in helping PTSD and PITS suffering. But you and I also must learn choice. The fact is that every choice you make makes a difference, you just need to choose what kind of difference you wish to make.

Vulnerable positions keep workers employed at physically demanding jobs, but it is the emotional toll of having to cut, boil, and dismember — very often living animals — that causes Perpetrator Induced Trauma Stress for so many. PITS features the word “perpetrator” in it, but this does not reflect that company policy, and public demand, in effect, perpetrate the demand for this kind of trauma. What is perpetrated is the act of killing as a duty, and a job.

First identified among veterans, and especially among German soldiers who participated in mass killing and genocide, PITS has also been studied in civil war settings, and child soldier and child abduction and murder cases. In effect, it turns out having to perpetrate killing, has extremely disturbing consequences for those workers.

Dissociation is normal

But it only makes sense that having to repeatedly take part in any kind of killing will be psychologically stressful. It is so difficult for some workers that they dissociate, and also develop varying degrees of PTSD symptoms, as well.

Some outcomes are addiction and abuse of substances to cope, increased domestic violence and irritability, paranoia, anxiety, unbearable guilt, depression, resentment, and even amnesia.

Think about having to kill animals on a kind of conveyor belt system. Even without all the terror and suffering one has to witness, there is a completely numb and robotic mechanical aspect to such jobs. They are quite unsafe jobs, as well. Think of being surrounded on very long work shifts to sharp blades, bacteria, blood, guts, blunt instruments such as pipes (to beat animals to death) feces and urine, slick surfaces, and then add to that the anxiety about deportation, job loss, and low wages that make your job critical to your own survival.

Maybe Robot killers are the answer?

Perhaps someone could develop AI systems and a sort of killer robot that dispatches the thousands of animals killed for our daily meat. But, as a psychologist, I find that prospect even more chilling than the present system. Removing human beings from the act of slaughter is something like dropping a bomb on a city, or killing by drone. As we remove humanity from the work, we also remove humanity from humane thoughts.

All indications are that on the first day of a slaughterhouse job, our innate humane thoughts flood in. It is only after repeated immersion that people can dissociate enough to do this work. Even then, the burnout rate is enormous. For most in the industry, the workers are considered disposable, and the threat of replacement also contributes to worker stress.

We have an internal moral code that is normal. Overcoming this code, as the job calls for, leads to incredible cognitive dissonance. A robot would not have this cognitive dissonance.

A worker will have humane feelings but learns very quickly that he or she cannot continue unless they repress those instincts. This leads to a need to “toughen” up enough to do the work. It requires a level of dispassionate mechanics our species never evolved with. Most people cannot do the work for long. Because the work goes on twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, obviously, there is always another person who can do it just long enough to keep it going.

Robots could do this work dispassionately, without the greatest consequence of induced stress.

Indeed, as it is now, most workers who suffer from PITS report that the most disturbing thing is not the nightmares, or the tendency for addiction, or even more tolerance of violence that causes the most distress. They are most disturbed is that at being unable to feel “care” or “compassion”. They numb themselves in order to keep their jobs, and the toll is horrendous for those who manage to do so. In all other links to the wider world, they suffer a loss of connection.

Impossible choices, or Impossible Burgers?

Many people, do quit, after all. Few of us would have the ability to perform this kind of job. We may enjoy a great steak guilt-free, while the person who had to kill her enjoys no such avoidance of self-loathing. It is an impossible dilemma: do you want to feed your family, or do you want to quit and live with another kind of guilt?

The impossible choice is to have humans who can achieve this level of mechanical disconnection to living beings or to have effective robots who don’t. But there is another problem, the work calls for much physical labor and judgment requiring human hands-on interaction.

Also, whereas robot machines might seem less distressing, in the long term, and given climate crisis global consequences — a whole culture killing without conscience — is not the answer.

Over time, the switch may be made from impossible choices to impossible burgers, but there are other needs to address as well.

Curing PITS and related PTSD

These diseases of memory, nightmares, triggering and inability to connect to others have no cure at present. Treatments include medications, cognitive behavioral therapy, processing therapy, group therapy, and immersion, or exposure therapy which can be done with virtual reality. The primary need is to help a client process the trauma, express it safely, have it validated, and purge the guilt, resentment, and grief.

Other non-conventional treatments are being tried, such as medical marijuana and nature immersion reconnection (Ecopsychology). In addition to these treatments, a huge component of healing is societal acceptance that PITS, like PTSD, is real, and deserves validation.

We do have societal trends that are hopeful. Most people today understand that war and cruelty are a negative. This was not always the case, believe it or not. Social science and psychology over the last one hundred years have introduced the ideas of equality and humanity among all nations, religions, genders, and races. Animals’ welfare and human connection and compassion are quite related, and this concept is changing attitudes worldwide.

Accepting our belonging is more than half the battle

Science, for example, does not accept there is more than one human race. Likewise, there is but one spectrum of gender. These ideas percolate into most cultures, albeit slowly.

As we discover our belonging, we discover solutions.

Another fact that is increasingly accepted is that we are animals. We are connected, by natural laws to all systems of life, renewal, regeneration, and this includes shared DNA with animals and even plant kinship. These ideas have been around in Ecopsychology for decades, but have not yet reached mass collective consciousness.

Most of us will no doubt continue to eat animals, and even participate in wars (mostly financially through taxation), but over time, these trends will shift due to demands of sustainability, education, acceptance of our innate connection, and critical thinking skills.

For those suffering from PITS due to our meat consumption habits, here is another hopeful sign. The climate crisis is driving alternatives to unsustainable food practices. Such things as Beyond meat, and Impossible Burgers, and much more, are allowing more choice to those who wish to eat less meat. Lab meat is still in production and not to affordable scale, but the technology exists, and this industry will open wide the idea of cruelty free options, as well as job justice promotion for workers. Given a choice, people wish to feel moral and helpful. Less pollution, cruelty, unsafe labor, and health are obvious preferences.

Along these lines, people are looking for ways to find empowerment and self-sufficiency. Human beings, as we connect and relate to others, are finding that oppressive and unfair systems are being challenged daily. Protests are erupting everywhere. What is being demanded is justice, and a cleaner, greener world. This necessarily will lead to a better balance among human and non-human cultural needs. Already, we recognize that combat veterans and rape victims are not blameworthy, but in need of validation and compassion.

There are still those that will say violence and competition are integral to our human nature, but those are people who do not yet appreciate that all living beings, and systems, are also dependent primarily, upon cooperation.