Army Battlemind training course aims to build unit cohesion, trust
By Steve Mraz, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Sunday, August 10, 2008
LANDSTUHL, Germany — Building unit cohesion goes a long way toward lessening combat and operational stress problems downrange, an Army trainer told a class of soldiers and airmen preparing to deploy.
The lesson came during a four-day Army Battlemind training course last week and took place on the heels of three days of Navy-run training on combat operational stress control.
A few dozen soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines participated in the training sessions, and some will soon get the chance to put their newfound knowledge to use.
If the behavioral health specialists attending the Battlemind training at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center were to take something away, it would be to take care of warriors and build unit cohesion, said Mike Hagan of the Battlemind Training Office.
"When the unit is tight and everybody trusts each other, we have found through research they actually have less behavioral health problems, less psychological issues," Hagan said.
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http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=56663
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Excuse my language but BattleMind is Bullshit!
If BattleMind worked, there would not be more suicides and more attempted suicides than before BattleMind, but do you think they would be able to figure this one out yet? It came out in 2007 and yet again today I hear word of another soldier, a young, newly married soldier, who came back from Iraq and blew his brains out in front of his new bride. Is it because they do not show it to all the troops? Is it because they only show a lousy 11 1/2 minutes to the troops in Afghanistan as the BBC reported? Is it the trainers? Or, is the answer as simple as it does not work? I don't know but you would think that since some of the finest minds in this country have been put to work on PTSD, they would have reduced suicides and attempted suicides instead of increasing them while they stick their fingers in their ears and hope the problem goes away! If they cannot cope with any of this after all this time, what's it going to be like two or three years from now when most of them have PTSD and they are still doing what does not work? Unit cohesion? Trust? How can they have any when they cannot trust what they are coming back to? How can they when some of them are National Guards and Reservists expected to go back to their civilian lives and jobs?
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Battlemind is inner strength to face fear and adversity...blah blah blah.
ReplyDeleteSome people have this ability and some don't in the same way some people are tall and some are short, the reason that some are fat and some are skinny, why some have the ability to become great public speakers or comedians and others not. You're either born with or not. If you're not you can only be conditioned to a certain point. Some people can gain a little bit of battlemind, face these situations a little ways, others can handle it a long ways.
The military is narrowminded enough to thing that mental toughness is easy and if you're not then you're a 'pussy.' In the same way that not every soldier is physcially strong, and there are tons of physically weak soliders, there are also many mentally weak soldiers that will never overcome this. It's not that they are bad persons, they're just not cut out for the combat role.
Some realize this and get out soon after getting to their first duty station. Others will just ride out the contract and not do themselves further harm by getting out naturally.
Let the toughest ones stay in and go to war for the rest of their lives. Let the rest ride their time out without forcing a reenlistment or, if in officer side, resign when they're ready.
If the country is in such dire need of defence they'll be enough citizens to come to the rescue and fill the ranks when the time is right. We'll just fight the war on the homefront.
But don't give the line that I got to be mentally tough or I'm a weak person. All that matters is that person knows his or her limitations and has the courage to stick to one's prinicles and beliefs.
Thank you for the comment. I agree. Yesterday I posted a story about an Iraq veteran who was awarded a Silver Star and then came home to continue to be a hero for all others with PTSD. He not only has the mental toughness to have done his duty, he had the courage to save others and is still doing it. What the military considers "mental toughness" is not what it actually is. PTSD is a wound and the strength of "unit cohesion" has nothing to do with being wounded. It does help to have someone you trust to take to and have someone to lean on just as a human, but it does more harm than good if you are still being told you need to be mentally tough. All of them already are when they decide to serve the country.
ReplyDeleteThis is a wound, striking the emotions first, then sets off chemical changes in the body, reaching the mind. PTSD wound strikes all parts of the person, body, mind and spirit. BattleMind does not address this and in the process has done more harm than good but they still keep trying to make it work without understanding the harm they are doing in the process. I had a mental health professional tell me that "BattleMind is better than nothing." In a sense that's true because doing nothing to heal PTSD costs lives but this is a case of the "cure" making things worse.
Can I ask, was the comment by the mental health professional (better than nothing)...was that a military/VA health professional?
ReplyDeleteThanks.
Someone who works for the VA. I argue with some of them a lot. You have to understand that the people who work for the VA have their hands full. They hear what's going on only by the patients who come into their office. They hear what is going on by what the VA tells them. If the VA does not inform them there are real problems with something, most of them will never know. Don't get me wrong here, there are a lot of them who have been paying attention and they have been doing great work but there are far too many more without a clue what's going on. We know because this is all we do, we live it, research it and talk to a lot more veterans across the nation. While it is obvious to us that if Battle Mind worked, the rate of attempted suicides and successful suicides would have gone down instead of increased, they don't even think about it.
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