What thirty years of living with PTSD have taught me about the generation coming home from October 7.
There are things I know about the young soldiers coming home from this war that I wish I did not know.
I know that coming home is not the same as returning.
I know that a body can leave a battlefield years before the battlefield leaves the body.
I know that you can sleep beside the person you love and still spend the night somewhere else entirely.
That a smell can become a time machine. That a motorcycle backfiring on an ordinary street can make the body respond to a war the mind knows ended decades ago.
And I know that sometimes the worst day of a war happens long after the shooting stops.
I was 18 when I became a soldier. I served in an elite combat unit in the Israel Defense Forces.
More than thirty years later, I am still, in certain ways, serving there.
The uniform is gone. The young man who wore it is gone. I became a husband, a father, a writer. I studied psychology. I built a life. But trauma is unimpressed by chronology. It does not care that you have moved on. It has its own calendar.
For many years, I thought the defining word in post-traumatic stress disorder was trauma.
I was wrong.
I have begun to think the defining word may be post.
The word is so small we barely notice it.
Post.
After.
It contains a promise: Whatever happened, happened before. The danger has passed. The battle is over.
You survived it. Now begins the difficult business of living afterward.
People with PTSD know how unreliable that promise can be. The event ends, but some part of the nervous system fails to receive the news. Yesterday continues to invade today. The body keeps watch over a border that no longer exists.
Still, there is a border.
There is a before, an event, and an after.
October 7, 2023, and the war that followed have made me wonder what happens when even that border disappears.
What happens when there is no post?
For many Israelis, there has been no clean aftermath. A reservist comes home from Gaza and is called back. A family begins to breathe and another siren sounds. A soldier attends the funeral of a friend, sleeps in his own bed, eats breakfast with his children, then puts the uniform back on.
The front and the home front have bled into one another.
This matters psychologically. Trauma has traditionally been understood as something that happens to us.
Then comes the attempt to process what happened.
But what if the processing must begin while the happening continues?
Researchers studying Israelis after October 7 have begun using language that captures this strange condition. A 2026 prospective study following Israeli adults for 27 months described the period as one of “ongoing collective trauma.” Probable PTSD rose sharply after October 7 and later declined, but remained elevated for a significant part of the population.
Trauma is unimpressed by chronology. It does not care that you have moved on. It has its own calendar.
The study also found something important and hopeful: psychological distress and post-traumatic growth can exist at the same time. Human beings are not merely repositories for damage.
But I am interested in another possibility.
What if what we are witnessing is not only collective trauma, but cumulative trauma?
Not one wound shared by millions.
Millions of different wounds, arriving before the previous ones have had time to scar.
Israel did not enter October 7 psychologically empty.
No society ever enters history empty.
We arrived carrying previous wars, previous terrorist attacks, previous losses. Families carried memories of the Holocaust, persecution, and displacement. Veterans carried Lebanon, Gaza, the Yom Kippur War, the first and second intifadas, and operations whose names have faded from the news but not necessarily from the people who fought in them.
Then October 7 arrived.
And something collided.
A grandfather who survived one history watches his grandson enter another.
A father who never speaks about his war recognizes something in the eyes of his son returning from this one.
A child learns to distinguish the sound of an interception from an impact before learning things a child should know first.
A wife discovers that the husband who came home is home and not home.
None of these experiences is identical. We should resist the temptation to flatten them into a single national diagnosis. Grief is not PTSD. Fear is not PTSD. Being Jewish in New York after October 7 is not the same experience as surviving the Nova festival, being kidnapped from a kibbutz, losing a child, or fighting for months in Gaza.
Pain does not become more meaningful by pretending all pain is equal.
But different traumas can still speak to one another.
And sometimes they wake one another up.
A nationwide longitudinal study of Israeli Jewish adults conducted before and after October 7 found that previous trauma mattered to subsequent PTSD trajectories. Another continuing national survey found that prior trauma was among the factors associated with crossing clinical thresholds for depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress during the war.
This is one of trauma’s crueler qualities.
The past does not always remain in the past waiting politely for us to deal with the present.
Sometimes the present knocks on its door.
I have spent more than thirty years learning this.
PTSD does not always arrive carrying a sign with its name on it.
Sometimes it arrives disguised as anger.
Sometimes as insomnia.
Sometimes as addiction.
Sometimes as a marriage slowly learning to organize itself around one person’s invisible land mines.
Sometimes it is a father sitting at the dinner table who cannot explain why he needs to face the door.
Sometimes it is silence.
And sometimes, for a long time, it looks remarkably like functioning.
That is why I become uneasy when we try to count the psychologically wounded of this war.
We should count them. We must.
But we should also understand what the numbers cannot yet contain.
In July 2026, Israel’s Ministry of Defense reported that approximately 26,200 wounded members of the military and security forces from the current war were being treated by its Rehabilitation Department.
About 65 percent were seeking help for psychological distress, including PTSD, anxiety, adjustment difficulties, and depression. The ministry warned that, without major changes, the national rehabilitation system could be overwhelmed.
Those numbers are enormous.
They may also be early.
A national survey published in 2026 found that 35 percent of Israeli adults surveyed reported feeling a need for mental health treatment since the war began. Only 13 percent reported having received some form of treatment. Twenty percent felt they needed help but did not seek it, while another two percent sought care but had not received it or were still waiting.
Accessibility, including cost, distance, and waiting times, were among the major barriers.
There is another number I find difficult to look at.
In 2025, 22 serving IDF soldiers died by suicide, according to figures presented to a Knesset subcommittee. Between January 2024 and July 2025, 279 suicide attempts were recorded among soldiers. These figures must be handled carefully. Suicide has multiple causes, and wartime changes in the size and composition of the serving population, particularly the massive mobilization of reservists, complicate comparisons with earlier years. They cannot simply be translated into a PTSD statistic.
But neither should they be ignored.
Perhaps the most disturbing figure is one that does not exist.
How many people are walking around Israel today carrying an injury that has not yet introduced itself?
I think about this as a father as much as I do as a man with PTSD.
My generation knew war. The generation before mine knew war. In Israel, this sentence has become so ordinary that we rarely stop to hear what it means.
Trauma can travel through families without anyone formally handing it down.
Children learn the weather inside their parents.
They learn which subjects change the temperature in a room. They learn which noises make their father turn his head. They learn when their mother is listening to them and when part of her attention is somewhere else. They learn that there are questions one does not ask.
And now another generation is coming home.
Except many of them are not exactly coming home.
They are moving back and forth between war and ordinary life, between uniforms and children’s bedrooms, between funerals and supermarkets.
We ask extraordinary things of them.
Fight.
Come home.
Be a father.
Go back.
Come home.
Sleep.
Function.
Love.
Go back.
Then one day, presumably, we will tell them it is over.
I wonder whether their bodies will believe us.
There is a danger in writing about a society this way. It is possible to make trauma sound inevitable, as though an entire generation has already been sentenced to PTSD.
It has not.
Most people exposed to trauma do not necessarily develop chronic PTSD. One longitudinal study following 1,231 Israeli Jewish adults identified resilience as by far the largest trajectory in its sample. The 27-month study likewise found substantial reductions in depression and anxiety from their immediate post-October 7 peaks, alongside increasing post-traumatic growth.
That matters.
Resilience is real.
So is recovery.
So is love.
So is the astonishing human capacity to rebuild a life around something that once seemed certain to destroy it.
I know this too.
I wrote novels. I raised children. I loved my wife. I laughed. I worked. I traveled. I sat with friends. I experienced beauty. PTSD did not take possession of every room in my life.
But resilience is not the same as invulnerability.
And praising a society for its resilience can become dangerous if resilience becomes an excuse not to care for its wounds.
The question, then, is not whether Israel will survive psychologically.
Societies survive terrible things.
The question is what survival will cost, who will pay that cost privately, and whether we are building a mental health system capable of finding people before their suffering becomes the organizing principle of their lives.
Because the challenge may not be a single wave of PTSD arriving after the war.
Resilience is not the same as invulnerability.
There may be no wave.
There may be tides.
People who need help now.
People who will collapse when their reserve duty ends.
People who will function beautifully for five years.
People whose marriages will notice before they do.
People whose children will notice before their doctors do.
People who will never call what happened to them trauma because someone else had it worse.
People who are not yet hurting.
For most of my life, I wanted distance from the young soldier I once was.
Today I sometimes wish I could speak to him.
Not to warn him. It is too late for that.
I would tell him something much simpler.
When you come home, do not be ashamed if some part of you does not.
And perhaps that is what I want to say now to the soldiers returning from this war, to the survivors of October 7, to the bereaved, to families who have lived for years between hope and catastrophe, and, in a different way, to Jewish communities around the world that discovered after October 7 that history can suddenly feel much closer than geography suggests.
Do not assume that because you are standing, you are uninjured.
Do not assume that because you are functioning, you are fine.
And do not wait for suffering to become unbearable before granting it the dignity of a name.
I have lived with PTSD for more than thirty years.
I know its tricks.
I know how yesterday can enter a room before you do. I know that a war can end on a map and continue for decades inside a body.
But my war ended.
However imperfectly, however painfully, I was eventually given an after.
That is what frightens me about this generation.
We are counting the wounded now because counting gives us the comforting impression that the wound already has edges.
It does not.
Some wounds announce themselves immediately.
Some wait for silence.
Some wait for safety.
Some wait until everyone else has stopped asking how you are.
The war will end. I have to believe that.
And when it does, another clock will begin.
The one I have been living by for more than thirty years.
The post.
And only then may we begin to understand how many people came home carrying a war that did not.
