The Vets Who Come Home Who Never Come Home
Jul 22nd, 2009 | 6 responses
Perhaps the tide about how we treat our returning soldiers is changing. Finally. After decades of high military denial. A new report has just been released contravening the VA’s stance on PTSD in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, saying it is much more prevalent than the military has admitted.
You might recall much said about not awarding the Purple Heart to men and woman who are wounded in soul and spirit and mind by seeing /hearing/ being in war.
You might also remember much said about the memo written by a head VA officer telling her diagnostic staff to bypass the diagnosis of PTSD for vets returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, to not make those diagnoses at all, in order to save the government money.
Yet, it has always been that the men and women deployed gave it everything they had, even though, once home and wounded, often in more ways than one, the VA wanted to play VA Roulette with their lives… disparaging their issues, and thereby withholding treatment and… recovery. For those who gave it their all.
Where have we heard this before? Nam? Yes. Korea? Yes. World War II? Yes. First World War? Yes.
As I write this, Ms. Liz Cheney and James Carville on CNN as adversaries, are both nodding and averring that the VA gives excellent health care to veterans, ‘really excellent health care.’ This is not different from what Senator Murtha bragged about back at the beginning of the mad tangle of presidential nominations. “He” had always been treated well there. “He” knew the VA was wonderful to all.
He did not realize the difference between a Senator walking into the VA like a star and receiving the best of the best, and a kid from Iowa creeping in still in last year’s fatigues and drug addled and saying he’s going to cut himself.
Two of the true things about the VA: there are excellent and devoted doctors and nurses there; many. And many of the alert and insightful doctors and nurses there are not always allowed to do their medical jobs, using their best compassionate and trained medical judgments regarding soldiers, non-coms especially, without being quashed and detoured for non-medical reasons over which they have little or no control.
But now this new and detailed research on ages of soldiers most likely to suffer from PTSD, which circumstance of deployment cause more PTSD than others, and what percentage of soldiers coming back from the current two wars the United States engages, will be affected by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which incidentally… in many cases I think ought be called instead, “Post Traumatic Suicidal Despair.”
The link to the new PTSD study came to me from Shaun Mullen’s blog and can be found here, and at the same link too is an interview on PTSD with your Dr. E, who has been a post-trauma specialist for 38 years. Mullen’s choice of pictures, minus the one of Dr. E, are compelling choices, too. Double click on the images there to see them in a larger view.
6 Responses to “The Vets Who Come Home Who Never Come Home”
There is a serious crisis facing our returning veterans. Veterans for Common Sense leads the way in obtaining official government reports about casualties from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As of December 2008, VA medical centers and clinics treated more than 425,000 recent war veterans, including 115,000 diagnosed with PTSD. To learn more, go to: http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.php…. Thank you, Paul Sullivan, Executive Director, Veterans for Common Sense, Washington, dC
What a mess. Thank you G.Dubya.
Change?……keep your eye on the thing that moves as it jumps through all the hoops……….then look again…Vanished!
The spit dripping off many a GI's face is not the refusal to diagnose PTSD though that is insulting enough. It was the claim that all these soldiers had preexisting conditions, namely personality disorders that really pulled the beards right off their faces.
My brother lives with the spooks, the memories and triggers that haunt him still from Vietnam. His treatment: ETOH, his choice of wine or beer, as a sedative. Not the best, but it likely lowers his shoulders when all the creepers start crawling up his legs.
Seems no one wants to mention, like the non exist coffins, the rate of suicide among Vietnam vets, let alone Iraq vets.
I heard “what's his name” Gates, say the AMerican people, and the soldiers themselves, and perhaps the Taliban, and the Afgan people are all tired of war, war all time, perpetual war, war interminable…..
Maybe then…….??????
I find the whole thing problematic.
Spirasol is exactly correct.
They will call it pre-existent and classify you as having a personality disorder.
Additional comment:
Even if you attempted to inform them during basic training (which is supposed to be a no mans land in terms of such things, that is to say, if, during basic training, you fess up to 1) having used illegal drugs, 2) being homosexual, or 3) having a pre-existent medical condition – psych or physical – they're supposed to send you home as soon as you admit to it – it's as if you never joined.. That's what they tell you on day ONE of basic training!
As a matter of fact, my recruiting officer told me this line of crappola as well….
BUT ..
The first thing that is said when you “admit” to having had any such issues (being gay, using drugs or having emotional issues before joining the service) is:
MWAHAhahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahaahahahhahahaahhaahahahhaha!
And then they say:
“MWAHAHAhahahahahahhahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha!
Then, after they pick themselves off of the floor (because they've usually dropped to the ground holding their stomachs due to laughing so hard)…
They say, “You …You ..oh god… hahahaha… You BELIEVED THAT CRAP that we told you on day one???? You BELIEVED your recruiter??!?!”
And then, of course, there is more of the, “MWAhahahaha” …
And, MY GOD, do you feel stupid.
I found myself laughing WITH them and agreeing with them about how silly and stupid I was …
“Yes MAM! You are so right! HAHAHA OH GOD! YA! That's me! Stupid as they come! Yup! Anyone can con my sorry a$$ on any day of the week cuz I am such an imbecile, mam! YUP! That's me.. STOOOOOPID! HAHAHAHA… ya .. I believed you guys! HAHAHAHA .. What an idiot! HAHAHAHA!”
And we're bothing laughing and carrying on as if I hadn't just been told that my life was crap on a stick cuz they were gonna REALLY stick it to me now as I had been foolish enough to admit that I had “emotional issues” before coming in.
(humming that old Striesand song, “Memories”)…
Oh man. Memories of my military experience….the good old days.
(sly grin)
NOT!
Just so ya know, if someone admits to having a pre-existent condition during basic training and the military chooses to ignore or overlook that information, then it's (supposed to be) on them should that condition get worse during one's military career. That is to say, you are supposed to be given the appropriate disability rating upon your discharge.
In my case, I had to be discharged due to my “condition” worsening due to stress” but they put another label on my discharge (I was actually in the base hospital losing my mind as they made it an admin discharge) and years later as I slowly deteriorated into jello, they deny everything. Do not even believe the freedom of information act helps the average GI because it doesn't and do not believe that the VA is “your friend” because they're not. (I am not talking about the “people” but the system itself).
It's their job to make sure you do NOT get disability. Unfortunately, a lot of vets turn to the VA thinking that it's there to help them….
Can we say, “MWAhahahahhaha”
I can't…
But I'm sure that shrink I saw in basic training 35 years ago can. As a matter of fact, I'm sure that she finds this whole “PTSD” thing hysterically funny.
The woman was the “Marquis de Sade” of psychiatry and there were a lot of her type running around when I was in. I can only hope this “situation” has changed because no one should turn to a shrink for help only to find out that they're in a room with Doctor Mengele.
My two cents worth,
Ghost
Dead man walking, the person that I was died in the first two weeks in Vietnam. Dreams, hopes, plans for the future, gone. Periods of total suicidal despair. Times when I envied my friends that they died at 18 in that filthy war. Periods of extreme violence. Absolutely no respect for rules, regulations, orders, commands,
speed limits, commitments to others (One thing Nam taught me solid was don't make friends, friends die and then you feel guilty because you lived through it.) That was the only rule “I come out of this alive.” I didn't die but I am simply a dead man walking.
I get full pension for disability because I happened to go off on a nurse practitioner who called the armed thugs to take me to psych stat. They took a resume of my service. Then I saw a doctor. He asked me probably ten to twenty questions. I thought this is the first time I have talked to someone who understood. Then he said, you have a condition called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you have to have care. I argued but I wasn't in combat. He said “Did you see anyone killed?” I said I was an eyewitness to three separate massacres of unarmed people, but I did nothing to stop it. He loaded me up with dope. A girl in the office whom I asked for help, told me that by the rules she could not recommend someone who could help me. As she said it she wrote out on a slip of paper Disabled American Veterans with an address and a phone number. It took 3 years to get full disability with the doctors ALL saying I had PTSD and the offices simply denying the claim.
I did not really believe that I had PTSD. It took three doctors who asked me to come in at 7 AM and talk to them. I knew they didn't come to work until 8 so I figured an hour wait. I'm eating Valium like popcorn on the bus over. I walked in and they came and took me to a room. They told me that I was a classic case of PTSD. That I had all of the symptoms. One said “except for the dog.” I didn't understand that until today when I saw a note on a blog saying that trained dogs were being found to be very effective in helping us PTSD patients. That it could be trained to watch for changes in mood or manner that indicated we were going to go off and that we had to up the meds. Plus, they it made easier for a PTSD patient to get a lot more sleep because his “friend” was watching out for him.
I argued with the doctors that I had been this bad before and had pulled out of it before. They just kept hammering on it. I raged, they listened and answered in calm voices, but what convinced me that the diagnosis was right was the fact that they took time out of their lives to convince me I needed help badly and that I would need meds for the rest of my life.
Something that no one has discussed on the health care field is the personnel at the Veterans Hospitals and the regular emergency rooms. The psychiatrists need relief. PTSD is catching and they deal with us every day for eight hours. They need to have relief even if we continue their pay at their VA levels and have them trained to work with early emotional problems. They are paying a price too high for caring.
They and the emergency room personnel. We need to reanalyze the whole situation in regard to medical personnel. I saw three massacres, a chief emergency room nurse will see more dead and dying people in a year than I saw killed. Think about it.
Hello there, I would like to just take a moment and say to you, commenters all, that I and other readers very much appreciate your first person reports about your family loved ones and yourselves who have been caught in the wringer of vet heath care/ recruitment irregularities, et al.
It's one thing to report as an observer as those do who repeat what they've read elsewhere and graft it to their own opinion– which can be valuable depending on the depth of opining. It's another matter entirely to report as a post-trauma specialist, eye-witness, wherein the ground heaves around one as one tends to/ tells about what others try to diminish. But, it's quite another to read the writings of eye-witness souls who have walked this path and personally struggled with a system that too often makes things worse in terms of added stress and sense of exile, rather than coming forward with just the helps needed, especially in timely ways.
I just wanted you all to know who have commented on this article that I and many other readers very much appreciate your candid testimonies, and your sharing truth straight up.
There are enough pretenders out there; but I note in them that authentic detail is often missing.
it is good to have the real McCoy.
Thank you.
dr.e