Vets face shortage of therapists that understand them

The need for therapists is high but according to the data coming in, it is only going to get higher instead of lower. More and more come home from multiple deployments carrying all they went through with them. Stressful enough but when you consider they are returning to families and friends with very little understanding of the changes they see in someone they love, it adds to the stress. Then consider the men and women discharged, facing the rest of their lives with the weight of the world on their shoulders, suffering from PTSD, TBI or physical wounds making it impossible to hold a job even if they could find one, and you see how the price of war does not expire when they come home.

Medication helps but numbing them is not healing them. Therapy in whatever form works best for the individual veteran, is a must but few do it and the majority of the therapist have no clue what makes a veteran different from a civilian.

Vets face shortage of therapists
New program training clinicians in psychology of combat is an attempt to help fill the gap

By Peter Cameron, Special to the Tribune
July 20, 2011

When Daniel Brautigam tried to tell therapists how he felt having urine thrown in his face at Guantanamo Bay, he experienced the same frustration as thousands of other returning veterans who have sought counseling.

"They had no idea how to respond to that. It looked like to me that they were grossed out, and they're supposed to be helping me," said Brautigam, 31, who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression following his return to Hoffman Estates from tours with the Navy in the Northern Arabian Gulf and Cuba.

The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that 11 percent to 20 percent of veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are suffering from PTSD. Others think the number is higher.

When vets seek therapy, they want a professional who can relate to soldiers in combat, and that usually means a therapist who has military experience. Without such empathy, therapy often is doomed, vets say.

Because most psychologists and mental health care professionals don't have a military background, there's a void in the safety net for vets. Some veterans' organizations have stepped up, training members to help their peers, and the Soldiers Project provides free counseling from licensed professionals and veterans by phone to newly returned vets.
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Vets face shortage of therapists

You don't have to go to war to be able to understand but you can't gain the knowledge from a class text book. You have to be with them, talk to them and invest a lot of time in discovering what makes them all so different. You can't treat them for combat traumas if you never even looked at a picture of what is left of a body after a bomb has blown up. You can't help them get past their haunting nightmares if you don't have a clue what happened in combat. Most of the therapy they need comes with common sense but if you have nothing in common with them, it makes no sense to them.

In 2005, after too many years of researching PTSD as well as living with it, I began to create videos to make it easier for the veterans to understand and come to terms with PTSD. When I searched for pictures, there were thousands of them. Many of them were graphic images of what comes with war but many were of the sadness when someone from their unit was killed. Tracking all these reports across the country, I know what happened there as much as I do about what is happening here. Looking back at almost 30 years of doing this, the greatest knowledge came from listening to them but had I not invested the time in researching "their combat lives" I wouldn't have a clue how to really help them.

I tend to their spiritual needs and I can help them to a point but I need therapists to send them too. What they need more is someone with a specialized training on trauma as well as combat but there are not enough of them.

If you are considering psychology please think about taking care of them. I can assure you that it will be a recession proof job with the numbers I'm seeing. I can also assure you that you will not come into contact with a finer group of people to help than our veterans. If you do decide to treat them then please find out where they've been and what went on there so that you at least know the difference between an IED and RPG. War in Iraq is not the same as war in Afghanistan. Know the difference as much as you learn the difference between the branches of service, regular military and reserves. The more you know, the more you'll be able to help them heal and while they will tug at your heart, you won't regret a single day of it.