Army still wrong after all these years on PTSD

This is why they keep dying and suffering. The Army still does not want to learn what causes PTSD. They really think it's something you can "train" for like how to shoot? How do you train for the first time you kill someone until you really do it? How do you train to watch your buddy die until it happens? You can't. What you can do is know why you suffer beyond what everyone else seems to be suffering. Once you know then you are able to help yourself heal from it instead of looking for excuses to deny it.

The door to PTSD comes in two parts. One is the ability to feel things deeply, good as well as bad. The other factor is the age of the man or woman because until the age of 25 the frontal lobe is not fully mature. Trauma kicks down the door and hits them hard. What can be taught is how to heal but first the military has to stop looking at the men and women serving like machines instead of humans. If they don't understand this basic, simple lesson, then they will keep making it worse instead of better. This is all just more of the same tactic they have been trying since they first claimed they learned anything about PTSD.

Army initiative aimed at preventing mental problems in returning troops
By Chris Vaughn, McClatchy Newspapers
Stars and Stripes online edition, Sunday, May 9, 2010
FORT WORTH, Texas — The Army is struggling to hire more mental health professionals to treat soldiers for readjustment problems.

It is burying a record number of troops who died by their own hands. Alcohol abuse and drug use discharges are up, and chaplains are holding marriage retreats to help families deal with a worrying number of divorces and domestic violence cases.

These are a few of the unwelcome consequences of the nation's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have whipsawed soldiers and their families from one long, combat deployment to the next for most of the last decade.

"We've never done a war this way before," said Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum, a flight surgeon and former commander of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

The Army, frustrated at its inability to get ahead of problems, has adopted a new tack — resiliency training for every single man and woman who wears green.

Army leaders, led by Secretary of the Army John McHugh and the service's top generals, are convinced that they can prevent some of the negative fallout on the home front by making soldiers more "psychologically fit" before they deploy.

"Listen, you don't just decide to climb Mount Kilimanjaro one day," said Cornum, who is leading the effort. "You get ready for a year before you do something like that. In the same way, we need to mentally and physically prepare for these deployments. If you go into it psychologically fragile, you're not going to come out better."
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http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=69891