Center’s focus: Mental health issues, severe brain injuries

Center’s focus: Mental health issues, severe brain injuries
By Jeffrey Schogol, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Saturday, June 07, 2008


BETHESDA, Md. — Defense leaders feel a "debt and a need and a requirement" to address the stresses troop feel from combat and what happens afterward, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Thursday,

"Combat changes people," said Marine Gen. James Cartwright said. "It changes the members of the service. It changes their families. It changes the communities they live in. And we have to acknowledge those changes. We have to address those changes."

Cartwright spoke Thursday at the groundbreaking for a new center to treat brain injuries and psychological wounds. The move is "overdue," he said.

"It is something that men and women in uniform deserve, not only from the current conflict, but from past conflicts," Cartwright said.

The National Intrepid Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury is slated to be completed in late 2009, according to a news release for Thursday’s event.

Money for the center is being raised by the Intrepid Fallen Heroes fund, a private charity that previously raised $60 million to build the Center for the Intrepid, a rehabilitation facility for amputees and burn victims at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, the news release said.
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