Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey wants more programs like Fort Bliss have

Chief: Replicate PTSD Program
July 18, 2008
Army News Service|by Virginia Reza

FORT BLISS, Texas - Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey visited Fort Bliss July 13 and said that an innovative program there to treat post-traumatic stress disorders ought to be replicated at other locations across the Army.

The "Restoration and Resilience Center" at Fort Bliss is a specialized treatment facility for Soldiers with PTSD who want to remain in the Army. The center is run by Dr. John Fortunato, a Benedictine monk, Vietnam veteran and clinical psychologist.

"Unfortunately you can't package John Fortunato and move him around and it really takes someone with that passion to drive these kinds of operations," Gen. Casey said, "but there are some of the elements of this that are clearly exportable, and we will do that."

Fortunato opened the unique treatment facility one year ago in July 2007. It all started when he worked at the Soldiers' outpatient clinic at Bliss, treating servicemembers who were coming back from deployment and diagnosed with PTSD. Their treatment consisted of medication and group counseling and very little individual counseling, due to insufficient staff. If, in the course of three months Soldiers were not fit for duty, they had to be medically discharged.

"There were two things about that, that didn't seem right," Fortunato said. "I got tired of Soldiers crying in my office, telling me they did not want to get out, that the Army was their life, and that's all they knew, and all I could say is, 'Sorry, we have to discharge you.' It tore me up."

The other thing that didn't seem right to him was signing paperwork stating Soldiers had derived "maximum benefits on inpatient and outpatient treatment."

"I thought, that is not true, because we haven't really tried hard enough to rehabilitate them. There were so many issues we were not addressing."
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