Note to Pentagon:PTSD? It's only human stupid!

by Chaplain Kathie

Are they out of their minds? The answer to treating PTSD is right in front of them but they can't see it. They are trying to alter the way humans process traumatic events by trying to numb them!

If they spend all this time trying to "short-circuit the brain’s stress response" then the see the answer to treating it. The part of the brain they see changed is where emotions live. ( I happen to think that is where the soul lives but that's beside the point for now.) Stress response is primeval, fight or flight. When it comes to the men and women (remember they are humans) there are different reactions considering who is involved in the life threatening situation. If it is just them, in split milliseconds their own survival is considered. Safer to fight or safer to run? If other people are involved, that's a totally different story because that comes from compassion, empathy, sensitivity, pick the word, it all involves the core of the person.

Do they think that Medal of Honor, Silver Star, Bronze Star veterans acted simply out of wanting to kill the enemy? Hell no! They acted with bravery to save the lives of their comrades. Read the accounts of the Medal of Honor recipients. Most of them were wounded yet somehow managed to still get up and save the lives of others either by manning weapons to obliterate the enemy before they managed to kill more of their "brothers" or despite the enemy, ran to save the lives of others. That not only required the courage to act it required the emotional connection to inspire it.

Read this,

Criterion A: stressor

The person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which both of the following have been present:

1. The person has experienced, witnessed, or been confronted with an event or events that involve actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of oneself or others.

2. The person's response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Note: in children, it may be expressed instead by disorganized or agitated behavior.

Criterion B: intrusive recollection

The traumatic event is persistently re-experienced in at least one of the following ways:

1. Recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event, including images, thoughts, or perceptions. Note: in young children, repetitive play may occur in which themes or aspects of the trauma are expressed.

2. Recurrent distressing dreams of the event. Note: in children, there may be frightening dreams without recognizable content

3. Acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring (includes a sense of reliving the experience, illusions, hallucinations, and dissociative flashback episodes, including those that occur upon awakening or when intoxicated). Note: in children, trauma-specific reenactment may occur.

4. Intense psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.

5. Physiologic reactivity upon exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event

http://www.ncptsd.va.gov/ncmain/ncdocs/fact_shts/fs_dsm_iv_tr.html%3C/

This explains how combat veterans have higher levels of PTSD simply because of the exposures to traumatic events. It also explains how police officers, firefighters and emergency responders become wounded by PTSD. While the rest of us can become wounded by PTSD from one event, think about the countless times they are involved with traumatic events piled on each other. Get a better idea now? Apparently the military can't grasp it.

If PTSD were all about just the person alone, then the criteria for diagnosing PTSD would not include "or to others" and when they are interviewing the GI they would not even consider them if they worked in a motor pool recovering the vehicles the trauma happened in. After all, there was no danger to them and they did not witness the event on anyone else. They simply witnessed the aftermath of it in the vehicle itself. It's a lot different than picking up body parts on the scene but they can manage to understand how dealing with it far away from the danger itself can wound them emotionally.

Numbing them will eliminate the thing that keeps them going in order to save the lives of others. Why do they enter into the military in the first place? Do they ever think of that? Sure some will join in order to be killing machines. They are the type that is disconnected from what makes us human and they are pretty much selfish "bastards" not giving a crap about anyone else. However the vast majority are out to save and willing to kill in order to do that. Why can't they get this part? What is the basis of this wanting to save lives of their countrymen? Obvious, isn't it? Compassion!

If they play around looking for a drug to kill off the same emotions that cause them to serve in the first place what will they have?

Next is the danger of some of the drugs they are already using. Read this part.

POTENTIAL HARMS
A detailed recounting of a traumatic experience may cause further distress to the patient and is not advisable unless a provider has been trained and is able to support the patient through this experience.

Pharmacological Adverse Effects

Note: See Table 4 of Module 1 – Treatment Interventions for PTSD – for detailed list of drug adverse effects and cautions.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) (fluoxetine, paroxetine, sertraline, fluvoxamine, citalopram): nausea, headache, sexual dysfunction, hyponatremia/syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone (SIADH), serotonin syndrome
Tricyclic antidepressants (imipramine, amitriptyline, desipramine, nortriptyline, protriptyline, clomipramine): anticholinergic effects, orthostatic hypotension, increased heart rate, ventricular arrhythmias
Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (phenelzine, tranylcypromine): hypertensive crisis with drug/tyramine interactions, bradycardia, orthostatic hypotension, insomnia
Sympatholytics: propranolol – hypotension, bronchospasm, bradycardia; prazosin – first dose syncope
Novel antidepressants: trazodone and nefazodone – sedation, rare priapism; venlafaxine – hypertension in patients with preexisting hypertension; nefazodone – hepatoxicity
Anticonvulsants: carbamazepine – leukopenia, SIADH, drowsiness, ataxia; gabapentin – sedation, ataxia; lamotrigine - Stevens-Johnson syndrome, fatigue; topiramate – secondary angle closure glaucoma, sedation, dizziness, ataxia; valproate – nausea/vomiting, sedation, ataxia, thrombocytopenia
Benzodiazepines (clonazepam, lorazepam, alprazolam, diazepam): sedation, memory impairment, ataxia, dependence
Typical antipsychotics (chlorpromazine, haloperidol, thioridazine): sedation, orthostatic hypotension (with chlorpromazine and thorazine), akathisia, dystonia, drug-induced parkinsonism, tardive dyskinesia , neuroleptic malignant syndrome, QTc changes
Atypical antipsychotics (olanzapine, quetiapine, risperidone): sedation, weight gain, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, akathisia (at high doses), drug-induced parkinsonism, especially with doses >6 mg/d
Non-benzodiazepine hypnotics (zaleplon, zolpidem): sedation, ataxia, rebound insomnia
Non-benzodiazepine anti-anxiety (buspirone): nausea, headache
http://www.guideline.gov/summary/summary.aspx?ss=15&doc_id=5187#s26

Do they go for the obvious? No, they have to complicate all of it by not doing the obvious. Taking into account that the aftermath of traumatic events has been the same since man began to kill other men, (See Cain and Able) there has been a price to pay for it. That price comes from the part of each of us making us humans instead of animals able to eat their own. The drugs they are already using have consequences just as the chemical potions they are trying to come up with to prevent PTSD will have consequences. What they can't seem to see is the answer to how to treat it is staring them right in the face.

Talk therapy works because they are able to tell someone about it and get a response telling them they are not an animal but a human grieving for the loss of friends or the pain of others they had something to do with causing. It lets them come to terms their own live was in danger. What they miss in all of this is turning around what they were told before they faced all of it. They are told that they can train their brains, prepare it to be mentally tough to endure what they were being sent to do. The problem with this is it tells them if they end up being sensitive humans wounded by PTSD after, it's their own damn fault. This has to be undone. They need to see the courage they had in the first place and that it required them to have the compassion in the first place to step up and do it. In other words, without the compassion they wouldn't have had the courage.

They need to understand how human PTSD is. It strikes all mortals from all walks of life. It thrives on the human emotions wounded by abnormal events out of their control, be it from being attacked by another person in commission of a crime or by an enemy trying to kill them. Be it from natural disasters or the obliteration of warfare. Be it from a cop on the street in a shoot out or a soldier in Iraq shooting it out on a street. An emergency responder in Florida or a combat medic in Fallujah.

The Pentagon is great with coming up with weapons but lousy on understanding the men and women using those weapons.

This is what caused me to post all of this.

Pentagon Investigates Pill-Popping PTSD Prevention
Wired News - USA
By Katie Drummond June 9, 2009 6:43 pm Categories: Army and Marines, DarpaWatch

As many as 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans may have suffered from PTSD or depression at some point, and the military has already spent millions on treatment for returning troops - everything from “samurai meditation” to at-home computerized counselors. Now the Pentagon’s advanced research arm is hoping that a combination of neuroscience, psychology, and creative pill-popping can stop battlefield stress before it even starts.

Darpa is hosting a one-day information session to solicit proposals for “Enabling Stress Resistance” among troops. They’re hoping to harness advances in molecular biology (the science of cell-to-cell interaction) and neuroscience that would short-circuit the brain’s stress response. Using animals as test subjects, Darpa first wants a precise understanding of how stress targets and damages the brain.
click link for more

This is yet one more problem they did not fix because they have been wasting time trying to get them to stop being human.

Psychiatr News June 16, 2006
Volume 41, Number 12, page 5
© 2006 American Psychiatric Association

Government News

Military Blamed for Inadequate Referrals for PTSD Assessment
Aaron Levin
The Department of Defense cannot assure that returning troops who need referrals for posttraumatic stress disorder are receiving them.

Only 1 of 5 of troops returning from Iraq or Afghanistan and found at risk for developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was referred for further mental health evaluations, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

In response, Department of Defense (DoD) medical officials said they will make criteria for referral more explicit but said that the report understates the number of soldiers who had access to care.

The report was mandated by Congress as part of the National Defense Reauthorization Act of 2005.

"This is about screening, not treatment," said Cynthia Bascetta, M.A., M.P.H., director of health care for the GAO. "We're not even at the stage of knowing whether they were treated."

The report analyzed information culled from the standard forms filled out by members of the armed services as they returned from the two theaters of war. These Post Deployment Health Assessment (PDHA) forms ask about physical and psychosocial health. They include four questions intended to determine risk for PTSD. Three or four positive responses to these questions indicate a higher risk of developing the disorder. After completing the forms, service members discuss their responses with a health care professional, who may be a physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant.

The GAO examined computerized data on 178,664 troops and found that 9,145 (5 percent) were at risk for PTSD, but only 2,029 (22 percent) had been referred to mental health specialists.

http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/41/12/5

When I was a child, at the age of 13, my father took me to the Pentagon. As I walked around seeing the sea of uniforms and medals, I thought they had to have been the smartest, bravest people in this country. Now I am not a child and while I still think they are brave, they certainly are not the smartest people. They stopped thinking like humans.