ROGERS: Are meds covering up PTSD crisis

ROGERS: Are meds covering up PTSD crisis?
By RICK ROGERS - For the North County Times Posted: May 7, 2010 12:00 am

It's been a dance of convenience between the military and post-traumatic stress disorder over the years. I remember a particularly nifty two-step by U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Joseph Dunford five years ago while he was assistant commander of the 1st Marine Division. Dunford is now the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force commander and a three-star general.

It was March 2005, and the Department of Veterans Affairs had just released an analysis of nearly 50,000 troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the report found that up to 17 percent had been diagnosed with major depression, anxiety or PTSD. It concluded that Marines and soldiers were nearly four times more likely to report PTSD than sailors and airmen. The findings paralleled findings in Vietnam War veterans.

Yet Dunford held a press conference to declare that none of these numbers even remotely resembled Camp Pendleton's situation. A scant 3 percent of his Marines needed mental health care, he said, attributing the tiny number to the superior counseling his Marines received before going to fight in places like Ramadi, Najaf and Fallujah.

Why was Dunford so sure of this? Because his troops had told him so: Three percent had self-identified in their post-deployment questionnaire.

I don't recall the general appreciating a question suggesting that, just maybe, 1st Marine Division troops weren't self-diagnosing because they wanted to go home on leave and didn't want to appear weak.

About a year later, official tenor on the subject changed. Maj. Gen. Mike Lehnert, who retired last year as the Marine Corps Installations West commander, told me then that constant combat deployments were indeed eroding Marines and their families, though he didn't spell out how.

Combat stress, Lehnert said, was endemic to combat, and only a psychopath could return from war unchanged by the experience.

Amen, brother.

So the Marine Corps culturally embraced "combat stress," but not PTSD. The former was a normal reaction of an honorable warrior to the horrors of war.
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Are meds covering up PTSD crisis