I have a secret that I know most men and women in prison and in urban America suffer from. Our secret is “Hood Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”, i.e. Hood PTSD. Hood PTSD is an understanding and recognition that men, women and children raised in war-torn ghettos across the USA are facing the same historical harms, anxieties and mental disorders as our soldiers who serve in the military and go to war.
I believe my mental disorder (Hood PTSD) has been caused by numerous factors in the ghettos, such as abusive parents, violence in the home, violence in the neighborhood, gangs, shootings, rapes, and all the stuff we see in the war-torn school-to-prison pipeline that we are taught in. By my being exposed to this level of prolonged violence and stress in my environment, it has had a very long-term effect on me, altering my way of thinking both psychologically and physiologically.
So when I look at how I developed Hood PTSD, I can’t help but think back to the recurring nightmares I experience to this day. It was the mid-80s. I was coming out of a movie theater in Hawthorne, California, at the Hawthorne Mall. There was a man lying on the ground with multiple holes in his face, and I still hear all the hollering as I looked around. I see this man on top of a car with the biggest knife I had ever seen attempting to fight off what looked to be security guards. I remember getting into the car and asking my dad, “Why didn’t you help or call someone to help?” He said, “That isn’t our business.” What’s crazy about that is I heard it from my father.
At or around this time I started thinking differently, but I was never asked what do I think or see. That left me to deal with life as I saw fit. Then around 1988, as fate would have it, I was shipped off for real Violence Training 101 with my big brother and his father. I looked at him as my father because he never beat me, and I looked up to him because he showed me how to have things. In looking up to both of them I was being molded to handle urban violence in America. But what I saw as a young man changed my reality forever. To this day I still smell the gun smoke. I also smell the second- and first-hand weed smoke in my lungs as that adolescent. I also feel the anxieties of that lifestyle.
Being exposed to this was detrimental to my development, but some of the other things I saw as a young kid hurt my thoughts to this day, like being in a house fire when my family lived in Texas, or when I had my head busted open with a baseball bat, or when I was in a gas explosion when my family lived in Los Angeles. I saw many shootings while growing up. And the enforcement of the drug spots around the communities. And the effects of a lot of this stuff really hurt how I viewed the world. For one, growing up I hated how my father treated my mother. On the other hand, my brother, who I look up to, slaps his woman from time to time, and I ultimately became what I hated and what I loved.
But in saying that, I don’t believe that before prison I had any truly healthy relationships with any women. I started out with a cuss word, then I moved to a slap, then I moved to doing whatever I wanted to do without thinking. Then dealing with alcohol, and smoking weed – I just moved how I wanted to without regard to the people around me. I think back to my father becoming a full-blown alcoholic who was in the dark, but his out-of-control behavior showed its face by way of yelling and most of all being very abusive to our whole family. I took the brunt of it. My father had already run my older brother and sister out of the house at different times. I really don’t know what it was but I guess his dad raised him the same way. I do know he made me “hard” toward everyone in the world and really not care what anyone thought about it.
I do know that living with Hood PTSD you start to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. I started to love the alcohol because I could blank out in a way that I wouldn’t remember anything and even more important I could stop the nightmares. Even as I look back at school I think about all the drawbacks that made me look down on myself such as not knowing how to read or even not being able to think for myself. When my brother’s father took an interest in my life, I found a voice, but it was the voice of the devil. This voice was the voice of hate, distrust and anger for all. This was the voice of the little boy who said nobody will make fun of me and no one will ever abuse me again. This was the voice of pain times ten. But I found out that voice needed to feed off of hate, pain and hurt from others to operate. Then as I think back, if I could have continued to work with the mental health doctor, I just maybe could have gotten some help. But instead I got help from the gang. The gang gave me that false sense of love and truth. It was a fake brotherhood. I was like the meeting of the pain bodies. Even the leader of the gang is a pain body himself. I still believe had I gotten help, it would have saved my life. I believe that at some point I believed that prison was in my future, but with the weed and alcohol I didn’t care because I really wanted to be dead.
I even know now that Hood PTSD played a big role in my decision-making, which got me into prison. When you don’t trust and something inside of you won’t allow you to trust, then you live with the thought “me against the world”. I even believe it doesn’t help much that most of the people in that lifestyle are really out to get theirs by any means. What’s even more crazy about Hood PTSD is that had the lawyers taken the time to look into my past, or had the judge been told about my Hood PTSD, then I don’t believe I would be here in prison; I would be getting the real help I need. As I think forward, I just pray that people in prison and urban America are able to read this and get some real help.
Hood PTSD is real. Just think – if a US soldier goes to war and comes back after a couple of years of active duty complaining of PTSD, his complaints are taken seriously. If that same soldier has issues with violence and breaks the law, uses drugs and alcohol, the community, the judicial system and the media come together and recognize the PTSD. In fact, in some cases neuroscientists can diagnose PTSD from an MRI or CT scan of the brain. But when a kid from the ghetto is acting out and has been to war in the ‘hood, the community, the police, the judges and lawyers come together to give the kid a life sentence when all the kid is doing is what he or she thinks is right. This is not right because, like the soldier, a kid growing up in a city like Chicago has seen more murders in the past ten years than any American soldier deaths from both wars combined. We should be offered the same medical community and judicial resources when faced with the same circumstances and symptoms that produced Hood PTSD.
Let me be clear: Urban America is not the only place that Hood PTSD has taken hold of but in urban America it has become a way of life that has/is hurting Americans everywhere. Again, this is not a black, brown or white thing – it’s an American thing that must be dealt with in a real way. So since the secret is out, can we get America to get us some help? Because this Hood PTSD is killing us!
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