Wednesday, March 2, 2011

PTSD: The Silent Killer

  PTSD-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a silent killer. It comes in many forms, however, our brave servicemen suffer the most. This article, written by Jason Notte, tells of how this disorder is ravaging our military. These brave men and women suffer in silence and we should not let them do it alone. If you happen to cross paths with one of our brave soldiers tell them how proud we are of their sacrifices. Because of them we are able to speak our mind in a free society. The recent turmoils in the middle east and Northern Africa is the reason I am posting this story.

FORT HELL: Retired Army staff sergeant Andrew Pogany suffered from hallucinations and panic attacks while on active duty in September 2003 — the result, he says, of mandatory medication administered by the military. Since then, 17 of his fellow servicemen from Fort Carson, Colorado, have committed suicide.
  Upon returning from Iraq, 23-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Jeffrey Michael Lucey suffered episodes of such intense war-induced rage that he'd often need to be consoled by his parents, who would rock him back to normalcy in their laps. On July 22, 2004, unable to handle the intensity anymore — the daily vomiting, the feeling that he was a murderer, the fear that none of his military higher-ups even cared — Lucey wrapped a garden hose around his neck in the basement of his family's Belchertown, Massachusetts, home and hanged himself.
  During his last visit to the Northampton VA Medical Center in Leeds for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) — a three-day stint in the hospital's psychiatric ward almost six weeks before he killed himself — Lucey had been prescribed a number of antipsychotic drugs, including Klonopin, Ativan, and Haldol. He was also given warnings that they not be taken with alcohol. Two days after his release, he destroyed his parents' car in an apparent suicide attempt. A little more than a month before he killed himself, say his parents, Kevin and Joyce Lucey, he was refused mental-health treatment by the Department of Veterans Affairs (known as the Veterans Administration until the late 1980s, but still commonly referred to as the VA) because he'd been drinking heavily. The Luceys insist that the VA focused on a symptom (the drinking) instead of the actual cause of his mental deterioration: PTSD.
  In January 2008, the Luceys were awarded a $350,000 settlement from the VA, which admitted no wrongdoing in their son's suicide. This past Thanksgiving, the Luceys were once again left with an empty seat at the table and emptiness in their hearts. A few days before the holiday, they distributed a letter through the non-profit organization Veterans for Common Sense, which used Lucey's story as a cautionary tale for other veterans and their families.
  Another front has opened in the wars being fought by the US military, and it is one for which the Pentagon was as unprepared as it was for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The primary (though not the only) enemy is PTSD, and to fight it, US troops are desperately being prescribed a wide array of medicines, from anti-depressants to anti-anxieties. They are also self-medicating in numbers beyond the control of the Department of Defense (DoD) or the VA, and the military has failed to provide adequate long-term treatment and follow-up care. America's troops both in the Iraqi conflict and in the one in Afghanistan are literally fighting their wars on drugs — and a record number of both active troops and discharged veterans are committing suicide.
  Tragic stories like Lucey's are becoming more commonplace. The journal Military Medicine found that, during an 11-month period in 2004, 30 percent of soldiers evaluated by mental-health staff in Iraq said they had considered suicide within the past week. (A DoD intelligence-center report on psychotropic drugs acknowledges this finding.) Of those, almost 64 percent said they had specific plans to kill themselves.
  Four years later, the situation has worsened. The Army announced in January 2009 that its suicide rate hit 138 — or little more than 20 per 100,000 — this past year, which surpassed previous highs of 115 in 2007 and 102 in 2006. (That's also higher than the suicide rate for the general population, which is 19.5 per 100,000.) And just this past week, the Army said it was investigating 24 potential suicides committed by troops in January and another 18 committed in February, up from 11 suicides in February 2008. If those numbers hold true, it will confirm what many have recently started to fear: that, for the first time since the wars began, monthly US troop deaths by suicide will have outpaced deaths in combat, and for two months in a row.
  Among veterans, suicides are exponentially more frequent. The VA announced in September that 46 out of every 100,000 male veterans between the ages of 18 and 29 killed themselves in 2006, compared with 27 the year before. (For women, there was a slight improvement, as it was three in every 100,000, compared with eight in 100,000 the year before.)
  Internal conversations at the VA suggest the situation is dire. According to court documents, when asked by the VA's media adviser in early 2008 whether it was true that 1000 veterans a day were attempting suicide, VA Director Ira Katz sent back an e-mail entitled "Shhh," confirming the number, but suggesting it be kept under wraps until the VA figured out the answer to this question: "Is the fact that we're stopping them good news, or is the sheer number bad news?"
  PTSD is the acknowledged root cause of most of the suicides. The RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research, a nonpartisan global-policy think tank, estimated this past year that 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer from PTSD, or about 19 percent of all troops who have served in the two wars. The impact of that astonishing number is difficult to articulate (although Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz has theorized that the true cost of the wars, including post-war veterans care, will reach nearly $3 trillion — see "Iraq: Five Years Later," March 12, 2008, at thePhoenix.com). Treatments are slow, expensive, and highly individualized. So even when the Pentagon does diagnose traumatized personnel in time (that is, before they harm themselves or others), it merely doles out quick-and-dirty medications that may hide symptoms — then too often redeploys those troops overseas, anyway.
  Untold numbers of traumatized active-duty US troops — specifically large numbers of those that John McCain praised during his failed presidential campaign for manning the "surge" — are taking prescription drugs with little or no medical supervision. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), mood enhancers, painkillers, and anti-anxiety medicines — Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin, morphine, Valium, Ambien, Zoloft — are ill-advisedly helping unfit-for-duty soldiers keep it together on the battlefield. The DoD appears to be aware of this, but its policies allow for such drugs to be taken in combat, regardless of side effects. When the troops return home, doctors and vets say the cash-strapped VA has little more to offer than further medication and group therapy, which hardly assuage a vet's trauma or curb his dependence on prescription drugs.
  March 17, 2009 According to numbers obtained by the Phoenix from the VA via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, of the 5439 Iraq and Afghanistan vets treated (for any symptoms) in Massachusetts since 2003, 277 were treated for prescription-drug addiction. That includes 147 treated in Boston.
"When we started out in 2004, we thought [soldiers' families] would need us a lot more when individuals were deployed, and [figured that] then the guys would come home and, in a couple of months, everybody would be fine," says Dr. Jaine Darwin, co-director of Needham-based nonprofit group Strategic Outreach to Families of All Reservists (SOFAR), which gives free psychological care to families of reservists and National Guardsmen deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. "That's just not what has happened."
Darwin says that, all too often, upon returning, the soldiers cannot relate to their families — their wives, their kids, their parents. They are completely alienated from everything and everyone they knew before. "The fact is that there is no normal," she says. "There's the new normal, and the new normal is how you negotiate relationships between separations and reunions."
Other factors :
Army Special Forces Staff Sergeant Andrew Pogany describes a young soldier's fatal overdose the way you might order soup at a deli: in plain English and without embellishment. "They labeled the kid a liar and a drug seeker, then he went home and
overdosed, and now he's dead."
  Such are the effects of half a decade of dealing with the military justice system. It's been that long since Pogany himself suffered hallucinations and panic attacks in September 2003 — which he claims are a result of taking Lariam, an anti-malaria medication that the military orders troops to take — and just as long since military doctors prescribed sleeping pills to wash away Lariam's side effects. Pogany has seen 17 other servicemen from his former base in Fort Carson, Colorado, commit suicide during that same of time.
  In early 2004, Pogany faced a court-martial (and a possible death sentence) for cowardice. Acquitted, he later that year was medically retired from the Army with an honorable discharge, at which point he moved to Washington, DC, to become an investigator for the National Veterans Legal Services Program, an independent agency that provides legal assistance to veterans with difficulties similar to his own. Throughout his ordeal, Pogany says, he has learned all too well what stress can do to a soldier, and says the military hasn't learned a thing. Troops who evidence symptoms of being what Pogany calls "suicides in the making," he claims, "are being overlooked and they are being ignored."
  PTSD is just one root cause of the spike in US troop suicides. Other theories finger such suspects as, among others, Army-issued medicines (such as Lariam), lowered recruiting standards, and multiple deployments for troops.
  While no direct links have been drawn between either Lariam or increased use of psychotropic drugs and a growing military-suicide rate, their parallel course is, at best, inconvenient. Also eye-opening on the medicinal front, according to the US Army Medical Department's 2008 mental-health report, at least 13 percent of US troops in Iraq and 17 percent of US troops in Afghanistan are taking antidepressants, anxiety medication, or sleep aids. This adds to the New England Journal of Medicine's 2004 finding (the most recent statistics available) that 11 percent of military recruits had psychiatric histories before entering the military and the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center's May report, which found that the same percentage of surveyed active-duty personnel had at least one prescription for psychotropic medication within a year of deploying.
  According to numbers obtained by the Phoenix from the VA via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, of the 5439 Iraq and Afghanistan vets treated (for any symptoms) in Massachusetts since 2003, 277 were treated for prescription-drug addiction. That includes 147 treated in Boston.
  "When we started out in 2004, we thought [soldiers' families] would need us a lot more when individuals were deployed, and [figured that] then the guys would come home and, in a couple of months, everybody would be fine," says Dr. Jaine Darwin, co-director of Needham-based nonprofit group Strategic Outreach to Families of All Reservists (SOFAR), which gives free psychological care to families of reservists and National Guardsmen deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. "That's just not what has happened."
Darwin says that, all too often, upon returning, the soldiers cannot relate to their families — their wives, their kids, their parents. They are completely alienated from everything and everyone they knew before. "The fact is that there is no normal," she says. "There's the new normal, and the new normal is how you negotiate relationships between separations and reunions."

I have been treated for PTSD for several years, now. I do not portend to be in the same class as the brave men and women in our military, today. I do have an understanding of what is going on and I pray for those afflicted.            theblogmeister







 





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