From the Monday, October 26, 2007, Toronto Star, News section, page A2, here is another article on the mental health issues arising in returning soldiers from Afghanistan. It seems to me that this is one of the additional reasons, besides the death and injury of soldiers, that Canada should not be involved in Afghanistan, in a war that cannot be won.
Afghan War Takes Its Toll
Mental health problems common afer soldiers return to Canada
Alison Auld
The Canadian Press
Halifax - Hundreds of Canadian soldiers returning from Afghanistan are suffering from a range of mental-health problems linked to their deployment, according to new data.
But even with this latest information, the military admits it still has little understanding of how many troops might be affected by the rigours of war and operational stress over the long haul.
About 28 per cent of the 2,700 Canadian Forces soldiers who were screened after serving in the war-torn country were found to have symptoms of one or more mental-health problems, including depression, panic disorders and suicidal tendencies.
Of those, 17 per cent exhibited signs of high-risk drinking, about 5 per cent showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and another 5 per cent had symptoms of major depression.
"It's significant, but it's commensurate with the difficult nature of the operation," Dr. Mark Zamorski, head of the military's deployment health section, said in an interview from Ottawa about the data he compiled in August. "It's concerning because we ask our members to put a lot on the line."
The military might also be capturing only a small number of troops suffering from mental-health problems because it lacks a comprehensive information system that both tracks soldiers' health over a long period of time and gathers data from all sources.
Soldiers are supposed to undergo screening sometime between 90 to 180 days after they return home from their deployment. But if they develop mental-health problems after that period, they won't be included in Zamorski's data.
An official with Veterans Affairs said that since the Afghan mission began five years ago, the number of clients receiving care for PTSD at the department's clinics had risen to 6,500 from 1,800. That figure could include vets from previous conflicts.
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Monday, December 3, 2007
Thursday, November 29, 2007
This is a very disturbing and sad article from AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/68713/, War on Iraq section, posted November 26, 2007, about the number of American veterans who have committed suicide. The woman who wrote the article, and who has also written a book about war, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide, is also a widow of a Vietnam veteran who died by committing suicide.
120 WAR VETS COMMIT SUICIDE EACH WEEK ON AVERAGE
by Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted November 26, 2007. The military refuses to come clean, insisting the high rates are due to "personal problems," not experience in combat.
Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.
As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.
Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call "accidental noncombat deaths" to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have "personal problems."
Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.
They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that most secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue. In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's too late to say you're sorry.
The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.
For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people, they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-: "Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania," proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.
Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.
Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!
Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.
Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.
There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.
There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1.
. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?
*I say "about" because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces.
Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.
120 WAR VETS COMMIT SUICIDE EACH WEEK ON AVERAGE
by Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted November 26, 2007. The military refuses to come clean, insisting the high rates are due to "personal problems," not experience in combat.
Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.
As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.
Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call "accidental noncombat deaths" to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have "personal problems."
Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.
They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that most secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue. In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's too late to say you're sorry.
The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.
For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people, they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-: "Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania," proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.
Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.
Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!
Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.
Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.
There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.
There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1.
. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?
*I say "about" because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces.
Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Post-War Mental Health Issues
I saw an interview yesterday on TV with a soldier back from Afghanistan who is suffering terribly from post-traumatic stress syndrome and his mother who was trying to get his commanding officer to understand her son needed mental health care. I don't know whether there are adequate resources in the armed forces to deal with post-war mental health issues, but from the interview, I understand that there is still room for improvement where understanding among some commanding officers is involved.
There is still a stigma with mental illness in society, let alone the military where part of the traditional image of a soldier is not to show weakness or emotion.
From the Wednesday, October 17, 2007, Comment section, page AA6, is an edited version of an editorial that originally appeared in The Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada:
Worth Repeating
HELPING SOLDIERS COPE WITH WAR
After World War II, medical professionals and others began to understand fully, for the first time, the toll that combat takes on soldiers, sailors and airmen.
Comprehensive statistics and a better understanding of mental-health issues brought out, in the post-war years, a reality that had been only poorly understood after World War I: Prolonged exposure to the risks and realities of organized bloodshed can cause psychological problems that can linger for a lifetime, just like the loss of a limb.
Many Canadians never came home from World War II, and some came home injured. But many others strode off the troopships healthy in body but damaged or vulnerable psychologically. Post-war, a disproportionate number of veterans - and their families - suffered from alcoholism, depression and the like, or committed suicide.
Now we are reminded that while much has changed in our society since then, the stress of warfare has not. New Canadian Forces statistics suggest that many of our Afghanistan veterans say they are enduring depression, the package of symptoms known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other problems.
The survey was conducted among some 4,700 Canadian Forces personnel who have served in the Kandahar area, polled between three and six months after coming home.
The findings were distressing: Of the 2,500 who responded, 15 per cent indicated they had to deal with one or more problems such as PTSD and depression; some reported panic attacks and suicidal tendencies.
The government has a responsibility to make sure that veterans can get the medical help they need to cope with their invisible wounds.
Fortunately, that does not seem to be happening. The defence department boasts of "robust measures" to help veterans, including pre-deployment preparation, in-theatre access to chaplains, psychiatrists and social workers, and attentive monitoring once vets get home.
That's all good. The costs of war are more than deaths and wounds and money; war is hard on all those who fight it.
As long as there are worse things than war, however, we must sometimes be prepared as a country to pay the price. But where money and attentive care can reduce the human toll, we owe it to our soldiers to do all we can.
This is an edited version of an editorial in The Gazette, Montreal, yesterday.
There is still a stigma with mental illness in society, let alone the military where part of the traditional image of a soldier is not to show weakness or emotion.
From the Wednesday, October 17, 2007, Comment section, page AA6, is an edited version of an editorial that originally appeared in The Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada:
Worth Repeating
HELPING SOLDIERS COPE WITH WAR
After World War II, medical professionals and others began to understand fully, for the first time, the toll that combat takes on soldiers, sailors and airmen.
Comprehensive statistics and a better understanding of mental-health issues brought out, in the post-war years, a reality that had been only poorly understood after World War I: Prolonged exposure to the risks and realities of organized bloodshed can cause psychological problems that can linger for a lifetime, just like the loss of a limb.
Many Canadians never came home from World War II, and some came home injured. But many others strode off the troopships healthy in body but damaged or vulnerable psychologically. Post-war, a disproportionate number of veterans - and their families - suffered from alcoholism, depression and the like, or committed suicide.
Now we are reminded that while much has changed in our society since then, the stress of warfare has not. New Canadian Forces statistics suggest that many of our Afghanistan veterans say they are enduring depression, the package of symptoms known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other problems.
The survey was conducted among some 4,700 Canadian Forces personnel who have served in the Kandahar area, polled between three and six months after coming home.
The findings were distressing: Of the 2,500 who responded, 15 per cent indicated they had to deal with one or more problems such as PTSD and depression; some reported panic attacks and suicidal tendencies.
The government has a responsibility to make sure that veterans can get the medical help they need to cope with their invisible wounds.
Fortunately, that does not seem to be happening. The defence department boasts of "robust measures" to help veterans, including pre-deployment preparation, in-theatre access to chaplains, psychiatrists and social workers, and attentive monitoring once vets get home.
That's all good. The costs of war are more than deaths and wounds and money; war is hard on all those who fight it.
As long as there are worse things than war, however, we must sometimes be prepared as a country to pay the price. But where money and attentive care can reduce the human toll, we owe it to our soldiers to do all we can.
This is an edited version of an editorial in The Gazette, Montreal, yesterday.
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