Sociopaths or soldiers?

Sociopaths or soldiers?
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
December 11, 2012

If the military thought they were training sociopaths instead of soldiers, then they would rightly be surprised with what resulted from these multiple deployments. In 2006 the Washington Post reported on how multiple deployments increased the risk of PTSD yet they kept doing it. Expecting what? A different result? Did they really think they wouldn't end up with the results we've been seeing with suicides? Attempted suicides? Escalating veterans charged with crimes resulting in the need for special courts to provide them proper justice and treatment instead of jail? An overloaded VA system unable to care for all the claims for service connected disabilities?

Yesterday I was reading the article on "Who’s most susceptible to PTSD?" and left a comment on it because of the way the writer ended the story.

With our troops home from Iraq and soon to leave Afghanistan, the “war on terror” is long over. The war on PTSD, however, has only just begun. It won’t be easily won.

Yes, I did mean "story" because I am tried of reading something that could be helpful only to discover it has no substance.

I checked back this morning and didn't see the comment I left which basically said the reporter became part of the problem. The "war on PTSD" began over 40 years ago so ending the story with the above added to the problem and screamed this submission was useless.

Beginning with history going back to FDR, tossing in research done and then ending with anything suggesting "new" is total bullshit.

Who’s most susceptible to PTSD?
A staggering number of returning soldiers are affected with the disorder, yet we still don't entirely understand it
BY KEVIN CHARLES REDMON
PACIFIC STANDARD
DEC 10, 2012

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who led the United States into the depths of total war and back out again, has a little-visited memorial on the far side of the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. It’s private and reflective, like the man himself, and chiseled into the rough stone are these words, from a Chautauqua speech made three years before the German invasion of Poland: “I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded… I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed… I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

The awful cost and calculus of war never changes, of course, but in the 60 years between Operation Overlord and Operation Iraqi Freedom, our understanding of the human brain, on and off the battlefield, has marched far ahead. Post-traumatic stress disorder—what Roosevelt would have known as “shell shock”—is now both a clinical term and a household one. A traumatic brain injury is understood to be as dangerous a wound as the kind that bleeds. Psychologists like Brett Litz of Boston University even speak of “moral injury”—an act of transgression that violates a soldier’s ethical or religious code, and leaves its scar chiefly on the soul, rather than the body or the brain.

PTSD affects some 27 percent of soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Congressional Research Service, while the suicide rate among male veterans is quadruple that of civilians. Those figures only include soldiers who sought help through VA hospitals, suggesting the actual numbers are higher.
read more here

Let's start with the 27% claim.

That’s the bad news. The good news, relatively speaking, is that post-traumatic stress disorder among all Afghanistan and Iraq veterans seeking VA health care from 2002 to 2010 was diagnosed in 27%. “No PTSD — 73%” seems like good news, even if it means more than 150,000 vets have been diagnosed with the condition.

Google search will show plenty of results for whatever we're looking for right away. The trick here is knowing what else has been reported to figure out if what you're using is right or not.

What was missing are the other facts. First on the list was the report that less than half of the troops needing help seek it.

Although one in eight veterans reported PTSD, the survey showed that “less than half of those with problems sought help, mostly out of fear of being stigmatized or hurting their careers,” the Associated Press reported.

From CBO THE VETERANS HEALTH ADMINISTRATION’S TREATMENT OF PTSD AND TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY AMONG RECENT COMBAT VETERANS

Some observers contend that DoD and VHA may not adequately screen, diagnose, and treat OCO service members and veterans affected by PTSD and mild TBI. In this study, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzes VHA’s care of OCO patients diagnosed with PTSD or TBI and compares the reported rates of occur- rence of those conditions within VHA with estimates of the prevalence of those conditions in the broader population of service members who have deployed to recent overseas contingency operations. (Prevalence estimates gauge the proportion of cases of a disease or condition in a population, whether or not people have received a diagnosis from a medical professional; by comparison, the reported occurrence of conditions among the people who have been treated within VHA reflects counts of diagnoses by medical professionals.) The study also examines the costs that VHA has incurred in treating patients diagnosed with PTSD and TBI.

Additional data from a recently published study found that 80 percent of OCO veterans who used VHA’s services and received new PTSD diagnoses had at least one follow-up visit; nonetheless, fewer than half completed the recommended treatment sessions within one year.10 The reasons for not completing a full course of therapy may include the following: the distance between home and the location of care, a preference for receiving mental health care from providers outside VHA, difficulty scheduling appointments, negative per- ceptions of mental health care, and impaired judgment as a result of either the condition itself or associated problems such as substance abuse.

Just over half of veterans of overseas contingency operations (OCO) treated by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) have a diagnosis of a mental illness.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) compiles national statistics on suicide, but veteran status and the cause of death are not always reported correctly on death certificates or summarized accurately by local health officials. CDC estimates that about 35,000 suicides occurred in the U.S. population in 2007. A separate system, the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System—which maintains more comprehensive data on violent deaths but operates in only a limited number of states—estimates that veterans accounted for 20 percent of the suicides in those states in 2005. The CDC and Department of Veterans Affairs have ongoing initiatives to tabulate all suicides among veterans.

Statistics from VHA’s suicide-prevention coordinators indicate that in fiscal year 2009 there were nearly 11,000 suicide attempts among veterans receiving care from the agency; 6.2 percent were documented as fatal. Among VHA’s patients in 2007, the rate of suicide was 35 per 100,000, a rate higher than that found in the general population. However, that rate is not adjusted for the demographics of VHA’s user population. Veterans who use VHA, moreover, may do so because they have more medical conditions, including mental health conditions, than other veter- ans or members of the general population.

PTSD is something that needs to be discussed but not by piecemeal. If people just keep reading crap, we won't see anything change for real. The military does not train sociopaths. They train soldiers. These men and women are willing to risk their lives for the sake of someone else and until the military acknowledges exactly what that requires, including their moral character, they will keep facing the same deadly results.