VA, DoD discuss suicide research, screening

After reading this I don't know if I want to scream or cry. How is it after all these years, they still don't get it? How can they not understand how the men and the women in the military think and react? Granted that there was very little research being done by the time Vietnam veterans came back, but that was in the 70's. Since then PTSD has been researched to death and there has not been enough results to prove new research has done any good at all. It may have made it worse aside from the findings that the changes in the brain of PTSD veterans can be seen with scans, the fact remains that suicides, attempted suicides and the complications of multiple traumatic events has claimed more and more lives every year.


Medication without therapy for PTSD does not work. So, stop sending them back into combat on medication and no therapy.

Make sure there are therapists deployed with them ready to listen as soon as they need to talk but you better make sure those therapist are trained when it comes to crisis intervention and fully educated on what PTSD is. So far, this has not happened enough. Civilians know what needs to be done following traumatic events when crisis teams rush in. So why has the military not learned this one yet?

Stop repeated deployments when the Army study showed the increase risk of doing this especially without enough dwell time in between them. When they are home, they need to make sure that the time back home is used to help them heal and not just rest so they regret.

Making sure families are aware of what PTSD and what part they play in either helping them heal or making it worse comes from what they understand. They need to be fully involved in all of this to make sure as the veteran heals, they are not making it worse, reversing the efforts or walking away from the veteran they couldn't wait to see again.

If the DOD and the VA want evidence on any of this all they have to do is to talk to families of Vietnam veterans still together and then they'll know what works. You can't stay married to someone with PTSD unless you know what works. The evidence is the life still being lived and the family still together despite all the odds against them. Normal marriages end with divorce rates as high as half, so to see marriages with PTSD in the family, you see all the evidence you need right in front of your eyes.

VA, DoD discuss suicide research, screening

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Sunday Jan 24, 2010 8:38:39 EST

As Veterans Affairs and Defense Department officials gathered at a conference Jan. 12 to discuss what research tells them about suicide in the military, a young Army captain stood up to ask a question:

“What can we do at the unit level? That’s the only reason my commander sent me here.”

He left empty-handed.

“There are certainly things you could do, but there’s nothing evidence-based,” said Col. Carl Castro, a psychologist and director of operations for the Medicine Research Program in the Army’s Medical Research and Materiel Command. “This is a very complex problem. Nobody has the answer.”

Castro called suicide the military’s “No. 2 or 3 priority, with [post-traumatic stress disorder] at No. 1.”read more here
VA, DoD discuss suicide research, screening