10 weeks therapy could not undo years for combat veteran

Correction:
I am leaving up the mistake I made on this post. For some reason, I did the post as he only received 10 "days" of therapy. A reader sent me an email to point out my mistake. While the point I made is a valid one, the comment was not right. I am very sorry for this mistake. I must have let my anger over another death take over what I was reading.

10 Days? That's it? The best programs last a month at least. Some programs last several months of in-house therapy to get them back on their feet on more solid ground.

I don't believe what they are hearing is helping enough in many parts of the country. It's not that all programs do not work, but they are not all the same. There are many psychologists without a clue what PTSD is but they are treating PTSD veterans. PTSD is still being misdiagnosed in many offices as anything but the wound the carry. If they are looking for bipolar, they'll find it when it's really PTSD. If they are looking for depression, they will find it and so on. What everyone doing this work needs to understand very clearly is that PTSD comes after trauma. That is the only way this changes lives. It does not come on like the flu and it is not a genetic mental illness. It comes after abnormal events outside the control of people.

No one is designed to endure endless traumatic events striking daily. Take civilians in a war zone and you'll find PTSD. Take inner city kids living near drug dealers and gunfire and you'll find PTSD. Law enforcement officers, firefighters, National Guardsmen and regular military are all exposed do abnormal events and no matter how much we depend on them, they are all still human just like the rest of us. They are also compassionate people and that is what opens the door to PTSD.

Scientists found the region of the brain where our emotions are held. They have seen the changes when someone is being changed by PTSD. It is an emotional wound, called an anxiety disorder but I call it a wound to the soul and so do most people with knowledge of what PTSD is.

It's time they got this right everywhere. The life of a veteran should not be predicted by where they live. Healing should never be regional.

Stress disorder plagued soldier
By: Andrea Koskey
Examiner Staff Writer
October 29, 2009

DALY CITY — Two days before 27-year-old Reuben “Chip” Santos took his own life, he sent an e-mail to his family telling them he was tired.

In response to the e-mail, his father headed to New Mexico, where his son, a decorated Army veteran who was raised in Daly City, was attending school. But before the elder Santos arrived, the family received word that Chip had succumbed to the post-traumatic stress disorder that had plagued him for years.

“He only received 10 weeks of therapy,” said Debra Burton, Santos’ aunt and family spokeswoman. “And it was a short, questionable process.”

Although Santos was also seeing a therapist at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M., where he attended school, it wasn’t enough.

read more here

http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Stress-disorder-plagued-soldier-67091442.html