Marine General John Allen, commander of forces in Afghanistan, is planning for the end – the withdrawal of U.S. forces, expecting to leave behind a small training force, but saddling the U.S. taxpayers with at least $2 billion a year to pay for the Afghan security force. Better deal than we have now, at roughly $100 billion a year, …
PTSD
Grey Matters
Two separate events Wednesday put into sharp focus what is happening to the young Americans the nation has been sending off to war for more than a decade:
— At 2 p.m., scientists at Boston University and the Boston VA announced they have found chronic traumatic encephalopathy – brain damage like that suffered by boxers and football …
Mental Ills Top Reason U.S. Troops Now Hospitalized
Former Foes, Now Allied
I love all of the current dialogue between the American Psychiatric Association and the military. For years, they were at loggerheads, principally about the policy of not allowing gays to openly serve in the armed forces. Military psychiatrists could wear their uniform at APA events, but were often singled out for criticism over the …
Civilians, Into the Breach
I am encouraged recently to see that community-based, civilian clinicians want to be prepared to meet the mental health needs of returning veterans and their families. One great example is the extraordinary response to a free …
PTSD: Weakness or Wound?
This week, the American Psychiatric Association is meeting in Philadelphia. Among the presentations in the “military track”—a spate of meetings directed towards practitioners focused on military or war related psychology and psychiatry—the top listed presentation is titled “Combat Related PTSD: Injury or Disorder?” Based on …
Psychiatrists Pondering PTSD in Philadelphia
Next week is the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, the largest yearly gathering of its kind. It’s exciting because of the prominence military matters are going to get. Last year there were perhaps 15 military-related sessions at the meeting in Hawaii. This year, there’s going to be twice as many …
The New Rules on PTSD
Wow. The new 17-page policy from the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General (OTSG ) on screening and treating PTSD is exciting and comprehensive. And will absolutely be controversial.
Although it is playing out in the news as related to the Fort Lewis controversy – were its reversals of PTSD diagnoses there fair? — this …
“Why I Quit the VA”
Nicholas Tolentino spelled out the reasons he resigned from New Hampshire’s main Department of Veterans Affairs health center Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs.
While his prepared remarks also detail just how flexible the VA’s data are when it comes to showing that vets are getting adequate mental-health …
Beyond the Headlines: Care With Compassion
I visited Joint Base Lewis-McCord in Washington state last week, to attend the retirement of a good friend of mine, another Army psychiatrist who has served for many years.
I have blogged before about my dismay at the allegations swirling around the post’s Madigan Army Medical Center. But this was my first time back to Madigan in …
A Lagging Indicator
Even as the pace of war, and the number of Americans waging it, is falling, their need for mental-health care is growing. On Thursday, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it is boosting its mental-health workforce by …
The Resiliency Trade
The Pentagon is institutionalizing resiliency, referring to a soldier’s ability to shake off the horrors of war and go back and experience them again (it has become such a buzzword that the Army has changed the name of its once-heralded Battlemind program to Resilience Training). Over at the Time Ideas blog, learning scholar Annie …
Two Unrelated Wednesday Afternoon Events
1. The Army announced that there were a total of 28 suspected suicides in its active and reserve ranks, nearly double February’s suspected toll of 15 suicides.
2. The San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco, released a study showing that Vietnam-era vets who did more killing during their …