Click Here For the Story. Photo: Thomas Dworzak/Magnumphotos
Playboy does it again. It is nice to see some hard hitting journalism at work. Their Lockheed Martin Article exposed the profiteers now we can see the real costs. If you missed the Lockheed story, I diaried it.
I got an e-mail from playboy alerting me of the story along with a press release. I do not work for them.
Iraq war veterans are not receiving the mental health care they deserve, specifically when it comes to the diagnosis and treatment of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Boal spoke with numerous mental health experts, government sources and former military personnel whom paint a disturbing picture about the government’s handling of PTSD.
Diaried by ilona a couple of days ago. Author of Moving A Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America's Returning Troops (Paperback)
Release date: May, 01
Pre-Order It now.
This article in Playboy's March issue is on newsstand now(go buy it). It is a truly sad story worth the read. Please go check it out it is 10 pgs on-line so I will not be able to post enough of it.
Adam Koroll is home now, a civilian again...
Jacob Burgoyne, meanwhile, is sitting in the mental wing of a Georgia prison, serving a 20-year sentence for murder.
As it turns out, Burgoyne had not been evacuated to Germany as Koroll had ordered. According to Koroll, a colonel in Burgoyne's command pressured the hospital to allow Burgoyne to return to America with his unit, the Third Infantry Division, which was to be one of the first units lionized for its heroism in leading the fight north to Baghdad. "He's a hero. He should be with his men" is how Koroll remembers the explanation coming down to him. After he returned to Georgia, Burgoyne, according to his mother, spent a few minutes in an Army hospital, spoke briefly to an Army psychiatrist and then was released from medical supervision. Exactly two days later Burgoyne attacked a fellow soldier in the woods near Fort Benning, Georgia, killing him with 32 stab wounds from a three-inch blade and then burning his body with lighter fluid, because, as he explained at his subsequent murder trial, "that's how we disposed of bodies in Iraq."
"Basically they told him to go out and have a few beers and he'd feel better," says Koroll. "Well, that's what he did. But he didn't feel better, apparently, because he stabbed someone to death." Standing up as he makes his point, he adds, "It's just a disgrace. The military failed."
This makes my stomach turn. Later in the article we find out that, "I don't know why it happened," he later said in court. "I actually liked Davis." He snapped...why? Lets look at what made him try to kill himself in Iraq.
Burgoyne was a good soldier, and he took his soldiering seriously, even this kind of housekeeping duty. He sprayed away the first layer of grime with a power hose, then dropped to a crouch to apply a little elbow grease with a big sponge. Scrubbing down a wheel well, he saw a small flash of white in the corner of his vision. Once embedded in the metal grille beside a tuft of human hair, a small white tooth had come unstuck and fallen to the wet concrete floor. Burgoyne watched it disappear in a swirl of soap and water. Then he doubled over and fell to the ground, unable to catch his breath.
"Evidently one of the tricks they used was to put children in the road to slow you down so you could be ambushed," Koroll recalls Burgoyne explaining. "Well, in Iraq you don't stop, and you don't slow down."
Soon after seeing that small tooth clatter to the floor of the wash rack, Burgoyne stalked back to his tent and chugged down a bottle of antidepressants.
This wasn't enough to send him to a proper psychiatrist. He only got a 5 min call with a psychiatrist back home at the VA.
PTSD is real and this administration is hiding it, Just like the real cost of this war. The New England Journal of Medicine, Did a study on PTSD its results are shocking.
Our findings indicate that a small percentage of soldiers and Marines whose responses met the screening criteria for a mental disorder reported that they had received help from any mental health professional, a finding that parallels the results of civilian studies.30,31,32 In the military, there are unique factors that contribute to resistance to seeking such help, particularly concern about how a soldier will be perceived by peers and by the leadership. Concern about stigma was disproportionately greatest among those most in need of help from mental health services.
Back to the press release
Boal found that the Department of Defense (DOD) diagnoses about 2,000 cases of PTSD a year. Yet according to a landmark study conducted by Army researchers and published in The New England Journal of Medicine, PTSD rates for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are running between 10 and 15 percent. That means one would expect to see the military diagnosing 13,000 to 20,000 cases of PTSD.
Former government officials agree there is a problem. "PTSD is being underdiagnosed on a fairly wholesale level," says Dr. Robert Roswell, a former undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
Now back to the playboy story.
"Iraq is Vietnam without the water." Hang around soldiers long enough and you will hear one of them say this. Actually the statistics suggest Iraq is a lot scarier than Vietnam. An exhaustive study of 303,905 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan done by a team of military doctors from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research showed that combat exposure is near universal and 24/7 in Iraq. The likelihood of a soldier having to face live fire is higher than in any previous American war. Ninety-three percent of Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans report having been shot at, according to data from DOD surveys. Some 77 percent have pulled the trigger in an attempt to kill, which is roughly three times the trigger rate of World War II; 95 percent have seen dead bodies, and 89 percent reported having been ambushed or attacked. The urban warfare in Iraq has no clearly delineated front and no safe zone in the rear where soldiers can go to decompress. The insurgency is spread across the country and moves freely through the same areas American troops have to traverse just to get around. No place, not even a guarded base, is safe, and the conflict has become the ultimate petri dish for PTSD.
What are we doing over there. And how the hell does this administration say that we don't support the troops. When they are undercutting our solders when they come back, and even dening PTSD existence.
Burkett is one of the administration's talking heads on mental health as it deals with the fallout of the Iraq war. Burkett cheerfully and forcibly presents the notion that PTSD has become a scam used by antiwar liberals and that thousands of Vietnam veterans are faking illnesses in order to cash in on federal disability payments. Burkett o-authored the book Stolen Valor (for which he received a thank-you note from Bush), which documents several cases of brazen fraud perpetrated by Vietnam veterans.
Considering that this anti-PTSD movement represents a minority position well outside mainstream psychiatry, it has achieved impressive gains in the past few years. Another spokesperson for the movement, Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and an advisor to President Bush on mental health issues, argues that mainstream psychiatry is pathologizing everyday life, turning normal states of consciousness into medical problems in a kind of therapy creep...
In 2004 leadership changed at the VA. The head of the agency, Anthony Principi, a longtime favorite of veterans groups, resigned. The timing of his resignation was suspect, as it came shortly after he told Congress the agency lacked funds to take care of veterans, and the move was widely interpreted as a firing. Bush replaced Principi with a high-level party operative named James Nicholson. A Republican power broker and a party heavyweight, he chaired the Republican National Committee during the 2000 presidential campaign, when he called Dick Cheney "one of the most qualified, beloved people in America."
Soon after Nicholson moved into his new offices, the VA, like the DOD, began to aggressively roll back its support for PTSD. First, in a move that echoed Burkett's charges, Nicholson ordered an investigation into the files of 72,000 veterans who had received PTSD compensation. Senate Democrats managed to undercut the review. In response, Nicholson commissioned a study at the Institute of Medicine to craft a new definition of PTSD, one more restrictive than that used by the American Psychiatric Association. That too fizzled. Finally, a second study was commissioned to "assess how PTSD compensation might influence beneficiaries' attitudes and behaviors in ways that might serve as barriers to recovery."
Can we really afford this war? The hidden added costs of this war is going to indebted our great grand children. Well maybe we can bet single payer non profit health care out of this. Other than that I cant think of any positives.
Harvard professor Lifton has been watching the attack on PTSD with growing concern. He believes there is now "a public assault on the diagnostic concept from neoconservatives, including neoconservative psychiatrists, and their message is that war isn't so bad for you -- or this war isn't hurting people too much," he says. "But I don't think the attack on PTSD will ultimately succeed. There is something to be said for reality, including the reality of suffering being acknowledged."
But veterans advocates fear the attack has already succeeded. They describe the unfolding situation as a train wreck, a catastrophe and a scandal. "You have large numbers of needy people coming back from the war, looking for help, and you have a government attempting to reduce expenditures, as well as conservatives who want to raise the bar and make it harder for vets to get the diagnoses," says Dr. Charles Figley, editor of Traumatology, who has written numerous books on PTSD and has been studying combat-related PTSD in veteran populations for 20 years. He is not an antimilitary person, and he recently spent a year on a Fulbright scholarship at Kuwait University. Figley adds, "What's going to happen? It's a perfect storm."
The Republicans have been weighed and found wanting on supporting our troops. When is the MSM going to wake up and cover these double speak repubs.
Just look how they handled Dr. Koroll. He got a dishonorable discharge. That will teach em. Don't go talking you dirty rat. /snark
War Is Hell (Shell Shock)