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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

New program to fight PTSD blames families?

When I first started to read this, I thought, "wow they finally got it" but by the second paragraph, I knew I was wrong.

They still don't get it. If the "years of research" they are basing this on has anything to do with the crap of training them to be tough, we can plan on a lot more funerals that didn't need to happen.


The Sensitive Soldier
Can U.S. troops be rewired to be impervious to trauma? In the wake of Fort Hood, Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum launched a groundbreaking program to eliminate PTSD.
Nov 11, 2009 6:09 PM EST


“How am I going to get people to focus not on tragedy, but on resilience?” Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum asks rhetorically as we sit in her Pentagon office. The question is now Gen. Cornum’s mission: She is charged with teaching the Army’s warriors—even in the wake of the homegrown tragedy at Fort Hood—to persevere in the face of any crisis.

Cornum’s program represents a historic shift in the Army’s training philosophy. Instead of lavishing resources on those warriors who have succumbed to post-traumatic stress, depression, drug dependency, DUI, or sought the ultimate escape of suicide, the Army this week began training its “healthy” soldiers in emotional and spiritual fitness.

“We’re devoting a great deal of effort to treating pathology, but 99 percent of people in the Army have normal reactions to fear and trauma. And we have done nothing for these people.”

Cornum is uniquely qualified to be the nation’s new director of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness. In 1991, as a flight surgeon during the first Gulf War, she was taken prisoner when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq. After three days of beatings and humiliations, this mother of a then-14-year-old daughter was released from Iraqi prisons. Her resilience and heroism as a prisoner of war convinced many in the Pentagon that women could indeed serve on the frontlines. And unlike former POWs, Cornum stayed in the military.

The new training program offers soldiers a tool kit of psychological techniques based on years of research. They can be just as useful in facing the fear of battlefield combat as in living room flare-ups. Senior military officers say the chief stressor in our current wars—when spouses and parents can call their warriors on cellphones at any time, day or night—are the fights that lead to family breakdown. But at a much deeper level is the emotional fallout from the nonstop cycling of soldiers through several deployments.
please don't read more here
The Sensitive Soldier

Well at least on this last part they got that right. Redeployments increase the risk by 50% for each time back.

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