The Weld in Soldiers is Strong, It’s Our Government That’s Weak-minded: The PTSD Scandal
May 17th, 2008 | 8 responses
Today is Armed Forces Day, though surely it’s ‘Unarmed Forces’ Day… soldiers back from war, who ought be celebrated also… treated with decency to mend up psychic wounds they carry… ones who display injuries just as much in need of healing as a shattered arm, loss of hearing, a leg no longer all there. Same symptomatology in many Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder injuries: shattered; loss of; no longer there in the way one once was…
Borrowing an image from welding, PTSD can also be seen this way: One or more strong welds have come undone; not from weakness in the welds or in the metal, but from the angles the strong welds have been bent to… the tonnage of stress-weight placed on the those welds–- far more bow and weight than this ’strongest of metals known to humankind’ can sustain.
The word ’stress’ in this diagnosis, is not what we feel when driving in gridlocked traffic, nor when competing for a job, nor when we have ten kidlettes discharging candy in the back seat. PTSD stress means, among other things, the psyche has been injured in a sustained way by horrific experiences …so that deeply instinctive elements of psyche are overwhelmed or disabled ….as though they never existed, or have become unreliable for us to put full weight on, /or exist only in an unrelieved black set of memories and griefs.
Shaun Mullen, veteran, writes at Kiko’s House:
PTSD SCANDAL GETS WORSE
I went pretty deep the other day in “Exposed: A Silent Epidemic Is Killing Our Iraq & Afghan War Vets” I urge you to read both this article and accompanying think piece on the anatomy of PTSD if you care about the kind of homecoming the emotionally wounded veterans are receiving.
If the sense of anger and frustration I feel didn’t come through, then I wasn’t doing my job. But then neither is Dr. Norma Perez, physician in charge of PTSD program at a medical facility for veterans who told her staff to refrain from diagnosing the disorder because too many veterans were seeking government disability payments for the condition.From a shocking article in the Washington Post:
” ‘Given we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,’ Norma Perez wrote in a March 20, 2008 e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple, Tex. Instead, she recommended they ‘consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.’“VA staff members ‘really don’t . . . have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD,’ Perez wrote.”
In case you’re wondering, adjustment disorder is a less severe reaction to stress than PTSD. Adjustment disorder has a shorter duration, hence is ‘easier’ and cheaper to treat.
Might I add there is a special place in hell for doctors who violate the Hippocratic Oath to save not tortured souls, but money.
This stunning memo from Dr. Perez, seeming to aim to ‘fix’ diagnoses the way horse races are ‘fixed’ in order to keep money in ‘fixer’s’ own pocket, suggests PTSD diagnosis be ‘downgraded’ to “Adjustment Reaction.”
In my experience as a shrink these past three-plus decades, Adjustment Reaction is a diagnosis for a child suddenly changing schools and having a hard time. Adjustment Reaction is a diagnosis belonging to a person going through a garden-variety, uncontested divorce.
Adjustment Reaction is not a diagnosis for men and women who have been to war, and who suffered serious ongoing or sudden trauma. Perhaps most telling in this shell game of diagnoses, treatment for diagnosis of Adjustment Reaction is most often not covered by insurance.
This means, injured vets of this war, would be thrown down into the same trench dug for previous vets, wherein government whistles and pretends agent orange exposure, for instance, is a figment of imagination, instead of a serious incremental illness. This means vets would be encumbered to pay for much needed medical help, from their own meager funds. This means vets will be left on their own -–for life– to deal with catastrophic injuries suffered while in employ of their own government.
Can a person, any person, feign PTSD? Yes, of course. There are scammers of welfare, there are scammers for Social Security benefits, people who are actually fit but lazy. However, most are not scammers. Our soldiers didn’t just slip in an aisle of the grocery store and become disabled. They went to war, a fighting, shooting, deadly war. They managed to come home.
Not all vets with PTSD are invisible to us: those men you see wandering on the streets in their cammies after their war service, they were no scammers either. If anything, the military system A.W., after war, has scammed many of them out of righteous and timely effective treatments for their most serious war wounds long ago.
Some observers might say, Yes, but they’re drug addicts and alcoholics. I’d say, Yes, many are. Now.
Given their lack of a required and timely medical care upon return from deployments, in many ways, since these soldiers didn’t have best medicine, they’ve been primed to settle for the poorest.
Even now, after so long, were they offered good medicine, solid compassionate treatment, many street soldiers might not accept it. Daily i.v. drip of cheap anesthesia can seem enough. To their minds, others on the street often understand more and better than any cleaner, better-dressed, well-fed outsider.
Too, a most poignant feature of severe PTSD is prevalent in the men who wander: they no longer have consistent touch with a core self. They might try but then refuse help, because the spirit and soul of the soldier is in some way still on duty, back on the Mekong delta or outside of Baghdad, or still in some way, marching NPD, Night Perimeter Defense… to keep all of us and their buds safe from harm.
A fine welder does not throw broken welded metal onto the slag heap, and especially does not re-deploy it back into use, pretending OSHA made up its hazards and safety rules just for the heck of it. The rules about fatigued materials, even at the level of OSHA, are about preserving health and saving lives.
A fine welder repairs the welds that have come undone, often cleaning out most the old material and replacing it with new material that can and will hold well… there’s often a phase too, of ‘letting the metal rest’… but assuredly never again bending the strong metals under extreme pressures which are already well known to break the strongest welds.
The military arm of our government ought have no lesser standards, no less ethos.
8 Responses to “The Weld in Soldiers is Strong, It’s Our Government That’s Weak-minded: The PTSD Scandal”
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[...] Peak Oil News wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe Coming Realignment (Libertarian) (Sat May 17 16:02:41 2008 PDT) [...]
[...] The Moderate Voice – Domestic and international news analysis, irreverent comments, original reporti… wrote an interesting post today on The Weld in Soldiers is Strong, Itâ??s Our Government Thatâ??s Weak-minded: The PTSD ScandalHere’s a quick excerptThe Weld in Soldiers is Strong, It’s Our Government That’s Weak-minded: The PTSD Scandal May 17th, 2008 by DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, TMV Columnist Today is Armed Forces Day, though surely it’s ‘Unarmed Forces’ Day… soldiers back from war, who ought be celebrated also… treated with decency to mend up psychic wounds they carry… ones who display injuries just as much in need of healing as a shattered arm, loss of hearing, a leg no longer all there. Same symptomatology in many Post-Traumatic [...]
I think people are under the mistaken impression that the V.A. exists to help veterans.
Generally speaking, that is not the function of the V.A.
Specifically speaking, in terms of PTSD or any psychiatric ailment that might in any way be related to one's service in the armed forces, that most certainly is not what the V.A. is about.
When a veteran goes to the V.A. for assistance with any issues (but especially psychiatric issues being as they much easier to dismiss – dare I say “disprove”) that he/she is suffering from due to their stay in one of our services, the job for the V.A. doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists is to prove that the veteran has no problem that can be associated with their tour of duty.
AND they will go to any length's to prove that the vet has no service related issue.
This can and does include lying, manipulating, false reporting, mismedicating (with intent), and the drugging of veterans so that when they have to appear in the V.A. court (of appeals – because, of course, they've been turned down repeatedly) they can't even speak correctly due to being massively over medicated.
When a veteran is hospitalized for that dubious condition known as “PTSD,” the nurses actually wander the ward to spy on the vet in an attempt to “catch them” in a less than “psychotic or depressed moment” and when they do (because even the worst of psychotics have lucid moments and even the worst of depressives have times they aren't sobbing) they DOCUMENT it copiously.
Trying to explain to the doctors or nurses that it's not so much about psychosis or even depression but more about being lost in this tunnel of forever fear in a place usually referred to as hell, will not help the veteran.
And the veteran is in double trouble here because they've entered into the system with trust and hope, thinking that the doctor's are there to help them.
Well, they're not!
They want you gone. They want you to disappear and go live on the streets. It's preferable that the veteran commits suicide rather than get a gov't check.
It is their job to make sure that our gov't does not have to pay any sum of money to some ridiculous person who's so weak that they just “can't get over it!” (sarcasm intended)
I actually have heard a V.A. doctor say those words to a depressed veteran, btw.
“Can't you just get over it!”
No. Some vets cannot get over it. Some veterans are doomed to a forever world of sorrow, nightmares and grief due to things that happened during their stay in our illustrious service.
And some doctor's are hired to be liars in an hospital system (V.A.) that is already populated with less than scrupulous people.
As for the faking of psychiatric illness…
My take on the faking of PTSD and/or any psychiatric illness comes from a discussion I had with V.A. nurse who was quitting her job due to the callous mistreatment of veterans by other staff members.
Veterans that she was trying to help.
When I asked her, “Well, what can be done about the fraudulent claims? The idea of people trying to get a psych diagnosis just to get on the dole is causing outrage in the general population.”
Her reply: “Just how psychologically healthy do you think a person is if they want to be supported by the public to sit at home looking at the walls? We have 30, 40 year old individuals coming in here that have lost everything they've ever owned, their homes, their families, marriages, kids, name it, all gone. They cannot function at work. Life as they knew it is over for these people. Just how healthy do you think these people are?”
How healthy indeed!
I think that for many people if they can't see the illness, it must not exist. PTSD and psych related illnesses that have been brought on by one's service (or you became ill while serving) are not easily seen and hard to treat.
Which brings me to another observation.
PTSD needs therapy more than it needs medicine (my opinion I'm sure but…).
Medicine does not seem to help these people very much but that is, for the most part, all they're going to receive at the V.A.
(I do not call going into a crafts room to make “leather wallets” therapy).
The V.A. does not supply much in terms of 'therapy.” It's about meds and LOTS of meds at that.
Perhaps if the V.A. was invested in helping veterans suffering with PTSD this might change but as I said…
Helping veterans is not what the V.A. is about. Proving their claims to be false so that the taxpayers can feel happy and secure while cutting services to the vets is what the V.A.
An aside…
In the 1990s alone when I was living in the SF Bay Area, Martinez VA was shut down (save for ER services), Livermore VA was closed down (save for ER services), an ungodly amount of clinics were closed at both Fort Miley VA and Palo Alto VA so that veterans were on waiting lists that went upwards from six months to a year. They did this dispite the reports that the Gulf War veterans were getting “ill,” and even as I arrived in my new state, they closed the V.A. hospital in the city that I'm living in (two weeks after I arrived in 2000).
Sorry for my rant.
If there is a silver lining to be found, it is that there are people writing and speaking out about our broken returning vets.
Histories are written about powerful leaders, valorous generals, brilliant battle strategies and victories won by nations. The dead and wounded are only a statestic, an asterisk, and part of a faceless background. in world changing events.
I don't think there is a country on earth which is blameless in ithe treatment of its returning warrior soldiers, should they return unable to sacrifice yet again in the next battle to be fought.
If there is a silver lining to be found in the Viet Nam war, it is that we have come to feel shame about how the returning soldiers were 'welcomed' home.
It doesn't look like we have learned enough yet.
The voices that refuse to be silent are imporving the odds that we will rise to the occasion this time.
. .
[...] Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes at The Moderate Voice: :”The Weld in Soldiers Is Strong, It’s Our Government That’s Weak-Minded: The PTSD Scandal“: Today is Armed Forces Day, though surely it’s ‘Unarmed Forces’ Day… soldiers back [...]
Tell it like it is Ghostdreams! Hell, they haven't yet resolved or helped the Vietnam Vets who came home with PTSD. I know my brother is one and he'll freely tell you he medicates himself with beer/wine which he thinks has less side effects than the types of medication they have tried to put him on. He fought for 3 years as a Marine, before his conscience caught up with him, then he took off his uniform refusing to put it back on despite promises of serving out his time in rosy placements. Despite a gaggle of revolving lawyers and the promised support of elected politicians, no one has ever been able to help him to recoup his rightful place among veterans or to collect anything of what was owed him. He struggles to this day. One day at a time, sometimes one minute at a time. He tells me the call to take his own life is never really that far away.
………..and then I read in the paper how every day this war has coming home soldiers committing homicide, mostly suicide at alarming rates, — to the point of predictability, to the point, if a society was concerned about releasing violent prisoners on parole, they should be concerned, if not for the soldier than for the society, that they are ticking time bombs, the weight of one foot still on a land mine trying to live a civilized life.
…….and then I read, not about reducing the diagnosis from more severe(PTSD) to mild and temporary (adjustment disorder), but to add and suggest that the frightening spiral of PTSD is caused more from weaknesses in the personality or said plainly, from Personality disorders. A character flaw, exposed when the soldier saw or experienced too much, too much injustice, too much rape, too much slaughter, too many unknown enemies– so much so the soldiers brainwashing fails, the warrior training fades, and underneath is a human being no longer able to parse or even make sense of most anything. And the questions, the regrets, the deeds done, play over and over, often with profound regret…….This is where help is desperately needed for left to his own devices, the veteran in this depleted state, the soldier will likely condemn himself for not being able to live up to the code of soldiers or the code of humanity. There is no place for him, no where to go.
So it is embarrassing to hear talk of patriotism on the front end, and then a disappearance of it on the back end. It is the ultimate card trick, leaving bitterness and ruin in its wake.
I apologize too, for the rant, but if one is affected, directly or indirectly, it is difficult to contain the associated rage and shame that bubbles up and over.
dear runasim, spirasol and ghostdreams. Thank you for writing your hearts out. It's ok. Sometimes, necessary.
Holding forth is way different than bluster. Yours is the former. In truthtelling, just my .02, a rant or two are required from time to time, just to clear off all trivia and cut right back down to the heartwood.
To be capable of outrage is still a virtue in my book; esp after a person has been assaulted day in and day out by the culture's rote interpretation of all matters, attempting to not only un-truth everything, but also unsoul everything. Maybe those are the same thing.
Point is, being stuck in perpetual rant (which you're not), and rant as a bridge to keep going… are way different from one another.
beblessed
dr.e