PTSD:Resilience, recovery, reintegration and Shakespeare

"Lamentable neglect" is a great choice of words to use. It's not as if they didn't know what would come. Reminds me of a movie I watched,

Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel) - Wikipedia, the fre...
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a 1962 novel by Ray Bradbury. It is about two thirteen-year-old boys, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway

Later I read the book. There were warnings about PTSD, or to put it properly, the tsunami alarm was screeching coast to coast but the Bush administration had their fingers stuck in their ears afraid to look at what they had created with taking on two military campaigns. As the experts began to speak out the claim of the quick conclusions was dripping thru the media channels and it became clear no matter what facts had been known from the history of both nations, no one thought to acknowledge any of it.

William Halloway and Jim Nightshade tried to warn the people of Green Town about this but no one would listen. As the townspeople began to change, they tried even harder to get the adults to pay attention.

"Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show," a traveling carnival with many wonders and delights

The "Cooger" in this case is the administration and they were oblivious with deadly results. The "Dark" in this case is the darkness the men and women of the armed forces were forced to be vanquished to in an unending nightmare game of "catch me if you can" while they fell thru the cracks instead of being helped.

When lip service and programs slapped together like using the cartoon of The Epic Of Gilgamesh to address PTSD was followed by BattleMind, another program that clearly didn't work because the rate of attempted suicides went up along with successful suicides, time was wasted, veterans were betrayed by insulting them with half-baked amateur productions passed off as brilliant. Just for an example, this was posted on my other blog before I started this one.

Sunday, December 31, 2006
VA AND DoD USING CARTOON VIDEOS

http://www.vawatchdog.org/
VA AND DoD USING CARTOON VIDEOS AS TEACHING TOOLS FOR EMPLOYEES
(12-30-06)The "Epic of Gilgamesh" cartoons used to teach Clinical Practice Guidelines for Post-Deployment Health Evaluation and Management.

Larry Scott of VAWatchdog.org just did it again. He never fails to shock me. This is just one more of the incredible reports he finds. The VA are up to their old ticks of offering cartoons instead of help.

I really wonder how much they paid to have this three part cartoon made.

One of the biggest things I noticed was when the "Doctor" suggested what to do while he was still trying to find a reason was for the "veteran" to get exercise and change their lifestyle. What is done to the veteran in the process is without a diagnosis by the VA along with a disability rating, the veteran is "non-service connected" for the disability and as such they are not treated for free for the wound they received from combat. Congress passed the rule change which allows the VA to bill for treatment for any veteran without their rating and a recognized service connected disability. In other words, until the VA puts a label on a veteran, it doesn't matter to them where the wound came from. They could be sitting in a wheel chair without the legs that got blown off in Iraq and all the VA will see is the service connected disability rating in the system. No rating, they pay. Nice isn't it?

Then when you take a veteran discharged a year or so before showing up complaining of the symptoms of PTSD and they will make them pay for the treatment unless the VA finally gives the determination of a service connected condition.Go watch the videos and then email your congressmen the link. Let them see what the VA is doing with the money they don't have to spend on our veterans. After all it is a new congress coming in now. The one who funded this kind of crap were voted out!

While I was one of the first bloggers to pick up on it after Larry Scott posted it, if you go looking for it now, my post is buried under the list of "experts" I never heard of. Anyway, it gives you some idea of what they were doing instead of investing in the time, finding the right talent and getting it right. But then again you'd also have to forget people like Sally Satel were advising Bush on mental health care and she was one of the "foremost experts" on how PTSD was a false illness used by frauds out for a free ride and trying to suck off the system.

At least now they appear to be serious. What it took to get this far were people finally thinking outside of the box they were given. All this time lost though while people like me were treated like Jim and William by the people of Green Town. It's really too bad no one listened to them or us when a lot of suffering could have been avoided.

At least this time they're using quotes from Shakespeare. By the information in this article, Brig. General Loree K. Sutton has her act together and just may be able to prevent something even more wicked from happening. We've lost too much time and lives already. I have to rank this one as hopeful.

Marching toward wellness
Ann Geracimos THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Wednesday, December 3, 2008

The military finally is getting ahead in the head business - tackling the psychological health and traumatic brain injuries of soldiers and their families in a comprehensive way.

It's happening at the moment under the leadership of an energetic, Shakespeare-quoting Army psychiatrist, Brigadier Gen. Loree K. Sutton.

Gen. Sutton holds a medical degree from Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, Calif. She completed her internship and residency in psychiatry at Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco.


Gen. Sutton, 49, is director of the year-old Defense Centers of Excellence (DCoE), an arm of the Department of Defense dealing with health matters. The concept is to find the means of caring for troops and their leaders before, as well as after, service members and their relations suffer the debilitating effects of trauma.

The game plan focuses on building up what is being called "resilience" among the military's many warrior volunteers as well as providing more and better treatment options for visible and invisible injuries of this type in a totally integrated program for recovery and reintegration. Gen. Sutton describes it as a network "like the Internet - a collaborative global network" functioning in a partnership, which is expected to take four years to put fully in place.

The plan, and its three R's - resilience, recovery, reintegration - had a big workout at a recent three-day DCoE symposium, titled Warrior Resilience Conference: Partnering With the Line and attended mainly by service members involved in health matters. Billed as the first of its kind, the event at the Fairfax Marriott at Fair Oaks typified what the organization sees as its mandate: promoting a shift of emphasis in the military away from what is known, in jargon terms, as an "illness-based medical model" toward a "wellness-centric resilience continuum."

The latter phrase is a mouthful, with good reason, covering as it does a range of approaches that almost directly counter traditional military culture and practices.

"It's ironic how the military trains us to overcome discomfort but not how to deal with invisible injuries," Gen. Sutton notes. "As soldiers, we keep a lid on our feelings while we do our job. But nobody tells us when to take the lid off or how to deal with it when we do."

At some point, too, she feels compelled to quote Hamlet on his deathbed, addressing his friend Horatio: "If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile and enter my harsh world and draw my breath in pain to tell my story." This is Gen. Sutton's way of emphasizing the necessity of bringing soldier-warriors' stories to light.

Such a shift acknowledges what has been lamentable neglect and often superficial understanding of the wounds of war that have proved to be different in different eras. Some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is known to affect hundreds of thousands of today's military serving overseas, along with the mental and physical impacts felt by the prevalence of improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
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