Too many prescriptions, too little talk for PTSD

Too many prescriptions, too little talk

By Andrew Tilghman - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Sep 3, 2010 12:10:33 EDT

Army Warrant Officer 1 Judson Mount was taking several medications simultaneously while recovering from severe shrapnel wounds at the Warrior Transition Unit in San Antonio.

The painkiller Tramadol and the antidepressant Zoloft were a high-risk combination, medical experts say, and it required close supervision.

But Mount was dead of an accidental drug overdose in the WTU barracks for two days before anyone found the married father of two.

The former enlisted tank commander who deployed to Iraq twice was found, forgotten and alone, on April 7, 2009, in his room next to several jars of pills. The cause of death was an accidental overdose of Tramadol. The "contributory effects" of the antidepressant "could not be excluded," according to the military autopsy report.

Whatever killed her son, Joyce Mount, a 63-year-old retired bank worker in Tennessee, does not blame the Army.

"It was a person — a pharmacist or a doctor or something - not the Army," said Mount, whose father was a retired Air Force senior master sergeant. "The Army's been good to me. They've been good to all of us. They were here at the funeral. But I feel like somewhere in the system, somebody has failed or messed up."
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Too many prescriptions, too little talk