Psychiatrist fueling "dangerous" combat veteran notion

Psychiatrist fueling "dangerous" combat veteran notion
by Chaplain Kathie
Wounded Times Blog
August 8, 2012

TIME has some explaining to do when they allow something like this.

This just fuels the fear factor of "dangerous soldiers" with no facts to support an outrageous claim.

It is stunning to read about what some "professionals" have to say. Most of the time, you end up wondering why they bothered to write it in the first place. TIME Battleland had an article by Elspeth Cameron Ritchie on the Camp Liberty shootings that are back in the news again. Clearly avoiding addressing the issue of why a soldier would go for help then end up feeling it necessary to use a weapon would have been a better, more helpful angle to write about but she turned around and talked about how hard it is for psychiatrists.

She wrote how violence against psychiatrists are way too common. Ok. How many times has it happened in over 10 years of combat? How about the reverse when a psychiatrist decided to kill as many as possible at Fort Hood? Ritchie is implying that this is a huge problem and it is disgraceful.

Deployed military need tailored mental health care but it seems that has been reported over and over again, yet, no one was doing anything about actually delivering on it.

In 2009 this was released.
Officials have said that troops are under tremendous and unprecedented stress because of repeated and long tours of duty due to the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The other claim Ritchie made was sickening. Trying to spin it back to being about domestic issues and not redeployments insults the integrity of the troops.

“You know,” I recall saying more than once, “if I sent everyone home whose wife was having an affair, we wouldn’t have a division here.”

I wonder how many of those "more than once" times it resulted in the soldier resolving his "issues" at the end of a gun pointed at his own head? The percentages are staring Ritchie right in the face. There are not 18 psychiatrist a day being attacked or shot by veterans, but they are committing suicide. There are not reports of 18 veterans killing their spouse everyday but they committing suicide. There are not hundreds of veterans committing crimes a month but there are that many trying to kill themselves. I track these reports across the country and the fact is simple. Combat veterans are more of a danger to themselves than anyone else. When you have 18 veterans a day (that they know about) killing themselves and an average of 1 active duty serviceman/woman taking their own lives topped off with the other reports of attempted suicides, that screams psychologist don't have a clue about what they need to do yet Ritchie wants us to feel sorry for them and blame and fear the soldiers. Does Ritchie get paid to write this crap fueling the "dangerous" soldier line to make headlines?

Ritchie got my attention with this headline but as soon as I read the first paragraph, I was at the boiling point.

Military Psychiatrists at War: True Life and Death Decisions
By ELSPETH CAMERON RITCHIE
TIME Battleland
August 7, 2012

Elliott Smith’s recent sad and gripping article for Bloomberg on the 2009 killings at Iraq‘s Camp Liberty certainly re-ignited my own anxieties. It brought me back to when I was an active-duty Army psychiatrist in Korea, Somalia, and Iraq:

The battalion, military police and combat stress specialists had three hours and 34 minutes to avert tragedy. Instead, after lost opportunities and miscalculations, the blue-eyed sergeant from Texas used a stolen gun to kill three enlisted men and two officers in the deadliest case of soldier-on-soldier violence in the war zone.

Such violence against psychiatrists by their patients is tragically way too common.

So are mass shootings by individuals who appear to have major psychiatric problems.

For psychiatrists in the military who are deployed in the war zone, the additional scary challenge is that their world is full of men and women with weapons.

Don’t get me wrong. Of course, these are Soldiers, Marines and other service members who are there fighting for their country. They generally strive to do their very best to do the right thing.

But Soldiers occasionally get “Dear John” letters from home. Or get mad at their commander. And are brought to their combat stress control shop or division psychiatry unit for an evaluation.

As an Army mental health provider, you are always being asked to make judgments of a Soldier’s risk to self or others.
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This is something else Ritchie doesn't take responsibility for.

Col (Ret) Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, served as Army's top mental health advisor during a period where suicide rates doubled. Recently retired, now Ritchie frequently writes about and speaks on military mental health issues. She is one of many who have recently reported the Services are likely underreporting suicide data among members of Reserve and Guard components.