Media keeps missing point after Fort Hood

Lowry is close but he's missing the point too. It seems they all are. Major Hasan was trained by the military to address combat trauma for our troops. Keep that in mind. If he kept getting bad reviews for how he treated soldiers, what was he telling them? Did he even know anything about PTSD considering he was trained around the same time they were still kicking out soldiers for "personality disorders" instead of PTSD? Did he end up involved with any of the soldiers who ended up committing suicide or trying to end their own lives?

Secondary PTSD is real. It comes from living with PTSD veterans and even civilian survivors of traumatic events. It can come from the stress of trying to help them too, but if the responders are trained properly, they understand what PTSD is, where it comes from, what their own symptoms are and usually they know what to do to help themselves heal. (I know because I've been there too many times when I end up with nightmares, depression and burn out under stress.) If they are trained they also end up with an arsenal to protect themselves and distance themselves from what they hear. If Hasan does in fact have secondary PTSD, then why didn't anyone see it and treat him for it? He was in mental health for heaven's sake and surrounded by people who were supposed to know how to spot it. Somehow I doubt they could be so inept they wouldn't have a clue this man was not in any kind of right mind to be treating soldiers if this was the case.

The other issue is why was Hasan being deployed if they were already really concerned about his performance? What were they thinking?

Fort Hood: The PTSD Evasion
By Syndicated columns
November 10, 2009, 6:08AM
By Rich Lowry

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who killed 13 of his fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood, is a most unlikely victim of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).



Rich Lowry He never experienced any combat-related trauma. He had never even been deployed overseas. Yet, he had barely stopped shooting his victims in cold blood, chasing the wounded to finish them off, when the media rushed to their copy of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

The New York Times headlined an analysis piece on the incident, “When Soldiers Snap.” It reported that in World War II, military doctors believed “that more than 90 days of continuous combat could turn any soldier into a psychiatric causality.” With Hasan, the paper stipulated, “that point may have come even before he experienced the reality of war.”

Time magazine blamed the stressful environment of Fort Hood, where frequent deployments meant “the kindling was hiding in plain sight.” The Washington Post ran a piece on Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Hasan had served, as indicative of “the ongoing tensions, frustrations and problems in the military health-care system for (returning) troops.”

The press keeps mistaking Hasan for Private Ryan, when the closest he’d come to combat was counseling sessions with soldiers. Another New York Times piece raised the possibility that Hasan might have acquired PTSD from the very act of treating those patients -- “in contact distress, of a kind.”

The obsession with PTSD serves two purposes. First, it fits the media’s favorite narrative of soldiers as victims. Here was poor Hasan, brought low like so many others by the unbearable burden of Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind that PTSD usually results in sleeplessness, flashbacks and -- in the extreme -- suicide. Hasan is the first victim of PTSD known to jump on a table and allegedly yell “Allahu Akbar” while slaughtering his fellow troops.
read more here
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/11/fort_hood_the_ptsd_evasion.html