Veterans battle PTSD stigma -- even if they don't have it

Veterans battle PTSD stigma -- even if they don't have it

By Stacy Lu

Fresh from a tour of duty in Iraq where he earned a Bronze Star, Ryan Gallucci didn’t expect a simple job interview to be such a memorably unpleasant experience.

“I was interviewing with a P.R. agency when my military service came up. Some of the questions got a little prying. ‘Oh, so what did you do over there? And what was that like?’ ”

Though he was called back for subsequent interviews, Gallucci said the experience left a “sour taste in my mouth.” Now the deputy legislative director for the Veterans of Foreign Wars organization, Gallucci suspects the interviewer for that other job may have been more curious about his mental health than his experiences in Iraq.

Research shows he may be right: Some employers are wary of hiring veterans because of potential mental health issues.

“There’s a whole host of questions you can’t legally ask, but I must say that somehow in interviews it comes out,” says Jim Pabis, a Colonel in the New York Army National Guard and Iraq combat vet who runs an executive search firm in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Nearly half of employers -- 46 percent -- said PTSD or other mental health issues were challenges in hiring employees with military experience, according to a 2010 Society of Human Resource Managers survey. And a 2011 survey of 831 hiring managers by the Apollo Research Institute found that 61 percent were "less favorable" toward hiring military personnel when considering war-related psychological disorders.
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Looks like the government has done a lousy job of getting the truth out about PTSD. Over 2 million Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans and a tiny portion of them end up in the news in a bad way. The vast majority of them can't find work because of a few bad reports?

Here's a link to a story on this blog going back to 2010

Are veterans being discriminated over PTSD or just because they are veterans?