Dan Jarvis, Founder and President of 22Zero — Dan Jarvis is a combat infantryman who came home from Afghanistan, where he discovered yet another fight on his hands: his own mental state and thoughts of suicide. It’s a battle many veterans fight, and lose. That’s why Jarvis built a nonprofit around a claim most veterans have already learned to distrust: PTSD counseling.
Veterans are often required to revisit their traumatic experience as a treatment for their PTSD forcing them into what Jarvis believes is a fight-or-flight loop. On the Justin Brady Show he argues that the condition is a stuck engine, that prolonged exposure often keeps the wound open, and that once a trigger is active the emotion attached to it can be changed. It’s a view that is highly controversial, but Jarvis says works.
About 20 to 22 veterans take their own lives every day, depending on the study. First responders, he says, now die by suicide more often than in the line of duty. Jarvis says for every two soldiers killed in Afghanistan about five died by suicide since they came home. “We’re losing more men and women back here in the United States than we’re losing on the battlefield,” Jarvis said. That is not a new crisis in police, fire, and EMS. It is a taboo one.
Most people don’t think of Police and Fire in the mental health debate, but it’s a real concern says Jarvis. Military deployments have an end date. First responders do not. Even off duty, a cop’s back is to the wall, watching hands and exits. An officers brain stays on alert, even off duty and over time elevated stress takes a physical toll. He describes the condition as a stuck engine. “Your brain is like an engine and it idles at 1,000 RPMs,” Jarvis said. “Then the traumatic event occurs, you hit the gas pedal and next thing you know, you’re hitting 7,500 RPMs, and then your foot stays on the gas pedal.” People with PTSD can live in fight or flight almost around the clock and the smallest thing can trigger it.
The smell of diesel at a gas station can trigger an IED memory from Iraq. Trash day can send a veteran, who saw bombs planted in roadside garbage, swerving around cans. A lawn mower can trigger thoughts of a helicopter. In many cases, the veteran isn’t even consciously aware of what triggered a memory.
The way many leaders and soldiers themselves deal with the trauma is to “suck it up.” One retired officer on 22Zero’s board told Jarvis he thought PTSD was weakness. “That’s why the men and women in the ranks are killing themselves,” Jarvis said. “Because they know that that’s what your thought process is.” People mask it so well that even their closest colleagues have no idea they are fighting for their lives. The coping is often alcohol, which lets a body running on anxiety fall asleep without ever reaching REM. Without REM, the brain cannot process emotions—it’s a feeling he knows well.
Jarvis spent 27 months in the Middle East as a combat infantryman. On his last deployment as a squad leader, half his men were medevacked with combat injuries. One soldier was killed. He felt responsible. During his recovery, his mother had had a massive heart attack and he never made it home in time to say goodbye.
The first night back home at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, he drank close to a case of beer to fall asleep. That was how he found sleep. He became actively suicidal and had no idea where to find help.
As a noncommissioned officer, asking for help meant being “that guy,” and he believed his commander would find out. Suicide started to look like the logical solution. “I didn’t want to die,” Jarvis said. “I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
One night he was looking at a rifle in the corner as a logical way out. Then he overheard kids in the apartment above run across the ceiling and he knew the risk was too high.
The VA’s approach of prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy, as Jarvis describes them, are built around talking about the trauma. The session activates the trigger, then the veteran goes home wide open. “It’s like pulling a tourniquet off for the next week until you go back,” he said. Homework can mean listening to a recording of the counseling session on a loop, which he says strengthens the pathway the treatment is trying to dull. About 60 percent of veterans who start exposure therapy do not finish it, he said, because it is that difficult.
22Zero’s alternative is the Trauma Resiliency Protocol.
Jarvis is careful: they did not invent it. They adapted visual kinesthetic dissociation, with more distance from the event. He argues the current methods are harmful. Active triggers do more than make people miserable.
Jarvis says the useful work is finding the root, activating that emotion, dissociating, and reframing it so the learning stays and the charge dumps. One man labeled a 20-year bundle of feeling “ex-wife,” a ten in his chest. After the reframe he sat through dinner with her and their daughter and did not feel what he always felt.
Jarvis did not get out of his negative loop by talking through his trauma at the VA. He got out, in his telling, when the emotion could be made malleable and then dropped, which is why 22Zero does not require anyone to tell the story at all.
At the time of this interview, treatment for veterans and first responders through 22Zero was free. The organization pays the peer coach. The site is 22zero.org. The email is gethelp@22zero.org.
The documentary Healing the Heroes of 9-11: The Way Forward, on the homepage, follows Ground Zero and Pentagon survivors who had been stuck for 20 years and, in the film’s telling, no longer are.
The original show notes were lost. This summary was written by Ai and edited by a human.
