Fort Carson sees progress in mental health battle as suicides drop

Fort Carson sees progress in mental health battle as suicides drop

Better screening, less stigma credited
December 24, 2010 2:23 PM
DAVE PHILIPPS
The Gazette
The murder rate for Fort Carson troops is dropping. The suicide rate is too. So is the rate of soldiers locked in the local mental hospital for suicidal or homicidal thoughts.

Army officials say it is because changes made in the last few years are finally taking hold.

And when Army brass come to tour Fort Carson looking for the keys to the success, they often stop in the office of a friendly, young psychologist named Captain Katie Kopp.

Kopp, 29, is the behavioral health officer for the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team — basically a combat shrink. When the brigade spent 12 months in the remote mountains of southeastern Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, she was there with them, helicoptering through war-torn valleys to tend to soldiers at outposts. In areas too dangerous for helicopters, she jumped supply convoys that often attracted rifle fire and rocket attacks.

“It gives me street cred with the Joes,” she said recently with a slight laugh. But seriously, she added, spending a year in the those valleys enables her to relate to the men she is now counseling for post-traumatic stress and other psychological wounds.

If a patient mentions he was in a certain company, she said, “I know exactly who the guys killed in that company were. I know the dates of those anniversaries, and I know the people who are probably going to need to talk about those anniversaries.”

Deploying a shrink with a brigade is nothing new. What’s new is that Kopp is still with them. In the past, most psychologists showed up just before the deployment and left days after the brigade got home. They weren’t there to help with the often turbulent months after soldiers return.

Kopp will stay with the brigade until it deploys again, and perhaps longer.

That change, and many like it, are designed to address the problems that kept soldiers who needed help from being identified, and kept soldiers who identified themselves from getting help.

At the start of the Iraq war in 2003, Fort Carson had little recent experience dealing with soldiers returning from combat and few mental health professionals. A third of mental health staff positions were unfilled.

As the war escalated, so did the amount of cases. By 2007, the number of soldiers being treated for post-traumatic stress at Fort Carson had jumped more than 700 percent.

Soldiers waited weeks to see a therapist, often only to be handed a drug prescription. Soldiers caught for drug and alcohol abuse and sent for treatment usually never got it. At the same time, countless soldiers never were identified as needing help at all. Many saw post-traumatic stress disorder as a weakness, or worse, a made-up excuse for cowards. Some soldiers were berated or punished by their sergeants for trying to seek help.



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