To DOD brass, N.O.W. cut the crap of resiliency

To DOD brass, N.O.W. cut the crap of resiliency
by Chaplain Kathie

I have been struggling with this for the last couple of days waiting to calm down. That isn't happening. If you follow this blog, you know that this is one thing I am very passionate about, so you're accustomed to my rants. This is about to be another one.

The fact that most military leaders care about the men and women serving is not the problem. Understanding them is. After hearing they can "train their brains" and become "resilient" they blame themselves when they end up with Combat PTSD. While the DOD will mention that some suicides are committed by men and women that had not deployed yet, they fail to address the fact that the threat of deployment plays a huge role in their suicides. The fact they feel the need to mention this when releasing suicide numbers, screams they are searching for excuses as the numbers prove what they are doing is a massive failure.

Enlisted Leaders Focus on Suicide Prevention
By Army Sgt. 1st Class Tyrone C. Marshall Jr.
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, March 29, 2012 – The most senior enlisted leaders from each branch of service and the combatant commands focused on the health of the force, and specifically on suicide prevention, during a conference here this week, the military’s top enlisted member said today. Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Bryan B. Battaglia, senior enlisted advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he and the other enlisted leaders collaborated on issues pertaining to the health, welfare and wellness of service members and their families.

Battaglia highlighted his “NOW” initiative, designed to reach younger service members. “The audience that I really wanted to reach is the 18- to 24-year-olds,” he said. The suicide issue seems to be most prevalent with younger service members, he said, but “it’s also important to educate the leadership too, so the audience wasn’t restricted to simply the young [troops].” The sergeant major broke down the initiative’s three-letter acronym.
read more here

The DOD bought the bullshit line that troops could train their brains to be "tough" because they didn't understand them in the first place. Did they ever ask themselves what it would sound like to them to hear this? Did they ever once wonder about boot camp training them in the first place to be physically and mentally tough? Being willing to risk their lives along with all the other hardships they are prepared to accept when they walk into a recruitment office proves they are tough enough to even think about it.

What has the DOD been doing? Telling them since the Battlemind training came out that they are not tough enough and have to train their brains to deal with combat. Whatever else the DOD has to say after this has fallen on deaf ears. How is a combat veteran supposed to think PTSD is not connected to being weak when that is exactly what this type of training drills into their brains? Does the DOD really expect them to reach out for help after this? Are they out of their own minds?

For the last 30 years (yes, I’m that old) I have been reading all the data coming in on PTSD. The VA didn’t accept the term until the 80’s but the mental health community was already using the term with an ever-growing understanding of what traumatic events do, especially when it came to combat trauma. In the 70’s, the Disabled American Veterans had already established Veterans Centers to help Vietnam veterans heal from where they’ve been. PTSD is not new. 

What is needed is not some new notion. What fails has been learned a long time ago and telling them it is their fault is the biggest mistake they could ever make. Do they learn from any of this? Hell no! They keep repeating the same basic principle under a different acronym expecting a different result.

The human mind has been studied enough that the age group the DOD targets for recruitment is not fully emotionally developed until the age of 25 when the region of the brain controlling emotions is as strong as it will ever be. Life forms this. Everything from the day they were born goes into who they will become and the good along with the bad experiences in life build into how they feel. In other words, they have been “training” their brains since the day they let out their first scream after being shocked into the first breath on their own.

This same age group, exposed to combat trauma, has an open door policy to PTSD crashing in. The other factor of their age is they believe they’ll get over it. Resiliency training enforces this delusion. If they want to save lives, stop military suicides then they need to stop this deadly approach.

Medicating PTSD troops and sending them back into combat without psychologists monitoring them and proving therapy is deadly especially when everyone they are serving with has been provided with the same “training” leaving them to believe their “buddy” is just weaker than they are.

They have no one to trust with what they need to talk about. They look at their buddies with “normal” reactions to the same event and they believe what the DOD told them. They didn’t train their brains and are weak. We see the number of suicides across the branches fluctuate month to month but then we read about the increased number of attempted suicides indicating that this approach is a colossal failure.

What works is explaining to them what PTSD is. They were exposed to a traumatic event that hit them harder this time than other events. That others exposed to the same event may not show problems today, but they may show up years from now. That the rate of PTSD for humans is one out of three and no one walks away from combat the same way they went in. Everyone is changed by it. The event caused PTSD and had nothing to do with how well they “trained” to be tough.

Start with preparing for traumatic events the same way the civilians do. Police and fire departments are ready right after the event to emotionally debrief the responders. Yes, they figured this out a very long time ago. This gives the “survivors” the ability to walk through the event from start to finish so that the last, worst, image in their minds is put into context with everything else that happened. If they had to kill someone, they will not just see the dead body but they will see that other lives were in danger before they had to pull the trigger.

Firefighters experience the traumatic event after the fire started but all too often they are too late to save all the people in the building and they need an emotional debriefing to understand that some things are out of their power.

For the members of the military, they not only face the situations where they are saving lives, but they are taking lives as well. They need the same approach available to them.

Train people in every unit to be able to walk them through the event as soon as possible so the last, worst image is not the only image they see when they go do sleep. They need to feel safe talking to someone that will understand and not judge them. They need to be able to talk until they are done talking about it so they can “fix” it themselves. In other words, make peace with it.

They need trained Chaplains and lay people to talk to about their spiritual issues without hearing some zealot tell them they are going to hell if they do not convert. I am with Point Man International Ministries because it works. They have been doing it since 1984 and saving lives while helping veterans live better lives. The peer-to-peer support needs to be replicated by the DOD coupled with healing the spirit/soul of the warrior sent and veteran coming home. Point Man helps all veterans. They do not separate them by wars but links them to each other.

With all that has been learned since Vietnam veterans fought to have PTSD treated, the DOD is the last to learn these lessons. We know what works but they have not understood what has failed.