First Coast military trying to get mental health care right

First Coast military trying to get mental health care right
Post-traumatic stress disorder isn't unusual after combat but the military's stance has changed, with troops encouraged to seek help.
By Timothy J. Gibbons Story updated at 12:11 PM on Friday, Jun. 5, 2009

Mike Murray got back to Mayport Naval Station from Afghanistan eight months ago, but his experiences there haven't faded.

"I haven't had a good night's sleep once since I've gotten home," said the petty officer first class who spent a year in Kabul helping the Afghan air force.

Murray volunteered for the assignment as an individual augmentee, the Navy's term - commonly abbreviated IA - for a sailor sent to serve with the nation's ground forces. The job was fun, he said, but there was the constant sound of rocket-propelled grenades hitting the NATO base where he worked and regular high-pitched explosions. Such things have a far-reaching impact.

"You become numb to it," he said. "You get used to throwing on your body armor, to throwing your flight suit on over your pajamas."

When he came home, he had trouble even driving, the result of leading around two or three dozen convoys through the crowded streets of Kabul.

"The first time I drove by myself [at home], I had to pull over twice because of anxiety," he said. "I would pull up to crowded stoplights, and instinct and urge would make me want to drive around the cars and through the intersection. We never stopped with convoys."

The long-lasting aftershocks of his experiences aren't unusual.

"We're not equipped to go and see that stuff and then come home and drop it," said Marianne Chapman, a mental health counselor who has spent much of her career working with the military in Jacksonville and Miami. "What they need to recognize is they're having a completely normal reaction to an abnormal situation."

That's a message the military has been pushing hard as it fights to preserve the mental health of its warriors. The cost of losing that battle was shown a few weeks ago when a soldier in Iraq who had been sent for counseling grabbed a gun and shot five fellow troops, including a Navy officer working at the mental health clinic there.
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First Coast military trying to get mental health care right