Marine died in his sleep; autopsy lists 27 medications

We read stories like this all the time but there is a deeper, darker secret going on here connected to the pills being pushed instead of real therapy. All of this "take a pill and you'll feel better" approach to combat PTSD leaves them with a bitter taste in their mouth. They feel as if they are just being given them to shut up and go away. This is especially hard on them when they are still in combat, given pills and no one is doing any kind of therapy with them. Pills do a good job getting things back into balance when they work but they only hide the symptoms of PTSD, usually numbing them instead of helping them.

Medication is needed most of the time but experts have been working on PTSD for almost 40 years and the good ones all say that therapy is key in healing. This is unique in mental illness because it was not something already there, something they were born with, any more than it is something they had control over. It invaded them. Like an infection, it picked on a sensitive part of their body, hit with force and then tried to claim more territory. It is a wound to the emotional part of the brain after exposure to traumatic events and you don't get much more trauma than combat because as long as they are in it, as many times as they are in it, it feeds PTSD.

The excuse offered in theater is the lack of mental health professionals and the need to keep boots on the ground instead of getting them out of there to heal. So they get pills for every issue and are expected to do their duty. (Snipers are even getting medicated.) So they spend a year with PTSD exposed to more trauma and threats to their lives along with the lives of their "brothers" and then we expect them to just go with the flow back home taking a pill, or in many cases, a handful of them.

One huge issue here is that part of PTSD is short term memory loss. Sometimes they forget if they took their pills or not, so they take them just in case, many times, after they already took their daily dose.

The only way to heal them is to add in therapy plus constant checkups to see how the medications are working and then adjust them depending on how the veterans lives are. Without therapy, you'll find them on heavy medications for the rest of their lives and no real healing happening.

After decade of war, concerns about over-medicated military
From Charley Keyes, CNN Senior National Security Producer
June 3, 2011 8:00 p.m. EDT

John Keith suffered blackouts taking his medication. He once threw furniture off a balcony and had no recollection of it.

"After I was taking the 10 pills and it wasn't working, I went back to the VA, and they prescribed me five more pills on top of everything else," Keith said.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
One Navy veteran says he took 15 medications a day
Marine died in his sleep; autopsy lists 27 medications
General says Army has new rules on prescriptions

Washington (CNN) -- John Keith rattles each pill bottle and raps it down on the table, 15 in all. "That's what they had me on right there, every day," the former sailor says of the prescriptions he received from Veterans Affairs doctors.

Keith, who lives in California, says his case is an example of how government doctors over-prescribe for active-duty and retired military, with often disastrous results.

On the other side of the country, the Ohio family of Chris Bachus, a decorated Marine who died in his sleep from an accidental drug overdose, also says military doctors are writing too many prescriptions.

"How could a team of doctors, allegedly working together, prescribe all those things together?" Jerry Bachus asks of the doctors who treated his brother with dozens of separate medications.
And the military itself is struggling with demands of its personnel returning from multiple warzone deployments and seeking treatment for a variety of injuries and mental issues.

Navy veteran Keith blames multiple tours in the Persian Gulf, on board the USS Kitty Hawk, for a variety of ailments including post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.

The cover letter on the official military autopsy for Chris Bachus strongly recommends that family members not read it alone, but with a family friend or minister.

It spells out the 27 prescriptions found near the body in March 2008, at Camp Geiger in North Carolina. The death was ruled accidental, blamed on "multi-drug toxicity."

The list of 27 prescription bottles found at the scene of death takes up most of a page of the autopsy, from topiramate to oxycodone to lorazepam.

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After decade of war, concerns about over-medicated military