Wounded Times Book of Revelations on PTSD

Wounded Times Book of Revelations on PTSD
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
December 27, 2012

This morning I read a comment from a member of Point Man Ministries about my blog on Facebook. I responded with this.

"Thank you very much! I appreciate your support. Sometimes it feels as if I am like John of Patmos, alone out here in the wilderness with much to say but few know."

I kept reading my emails when I read how the VA has admitted they have underreported the number of veterans being treated for PTSD.

VA UNDERCOUNTED AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ WAR VETERAN PTSD CASES
Nextgov.com
By Bob Brewin
December 26, 2012

The Veterans Affairs Department has undercounted the number of Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans seeking care over the past decade for post-traumatic stress disorder by 10,299 cases or roughly 4 percent, the VA acknowledged in a revised June 2012 report. The department posted the revised report Dec. 12 on a public health website not linked to its main website.

The revised report said the department relied on an improperly constructed patient data file that omitted three months of data in the original report.

The new report shows 256,820 Afghanistan and Iraq veterans sought care for PTSD at VA hospitals and veterans centers from 2002 through 2012 based on an underlying, revised report of 834,467 Afghanistan and Iraq veterans who obtained health care from the VA for a variety of conditions over the past 10 years.

This puts the number of veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars seeking care for PTSD at roughly 30 percent of the total number who sought health care. The overall, revised health care report shows 444,451 or 53.3 percent of the total sought mental health care, which includes treatment for PTSD, depression, psychoses, alcohol and drug abuse, over the past 10 years.
read more here

While that may seem like huge news to many people, it hasn't been to readers of Wounded Times Blog. I am sure the bloggers out there will end up just copying the article and posting on it. They do it all the time no matter if the report is a good one or not and this revelation will be treated as if it is shocking news. It is not to me.

Revelation 1 19 “Write, therefore, what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later.

I posted Battlemind should be surrendered on February 10, 2008 because I knew it would not work. It didn't. What followed this failure was Resilience Training, sold as a program to prevent PTSD. It tells service members they can "train their brains to be mentally tough" and in the process leaves the false impression they won't end up with PTSD unless they are mentally weak and didn't train right.

The number of suicides and attempted suicides increasing support my position. The number of veterans being diagnosed with PTSD support my position. The problem is, I've been screaming from Patmos and few heard my voice. Among the over 17,000 on this blog, there is this revelation.

Expect 800,000 PTSD veterans out of Iraq and Afghanistan
October 14, 2007

Iraq veterans deserve more than post-combat negligence
By Stacy Bannerman
Special to The Times

WHEN the appalling conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center were made public, accompanied by grim photos of moldy walls, crumbling ceilings and dirty, bug-infested rooms, it sparked a national outcry and immediate action. Unfortunately, it has been comparatively quiet about the nearly 300 Iraq war veterans who have committed suicide, and thousands more who have attempted it.

America cannot afford the price of failing to care for veterans with combat-related mental-health problems. The systemic breakdown in mental-health care is so profound that military families and veterans groups have filed lawsuits against the Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth have filed a class-action suit on behalf of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The suit claims there are as many as "800,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans said to suffer or risk developing PTSD." The groups charge the VA with collaborating with the Pentagon to avoid paying PTSD benefits.

Last year, it was about 400,000 we were worried about. The beginning of this year, it was 700,000 we were worried about. Now add in at least 100,000 more. Why? Are you shocked? You shouldn't be and the government shouldn't be either. After all it was already predicted in 1978 when the DAV commissioned a study showing Vietnam produced 500,000 diagnosed cases, as well as acknowledging the numbers would rise as more information came out and the symptoms of PTSD grew stronger. Even back then they knew PTSD did not always show up right away. So why is it no one was ready for what was to come now? They didn't care.

It needs to be pointed out as much as possible that when the Army did their own study finding the redeployments increased the risk of developing PTSD by 50%, this should have sounded a shrieking warning bell across the country and emergency measures should have been driven in overdrive, but no one did anything about it. As a matter of fact, the Bush administration cut back funding, along with Nicholson, in 2005, with two occupations producing more wounded minds daily. To have their lives still at risk after their tours have ended is sickening, is wrong, and there is absolutely no excuse for any of this appalling lack of preparedness. You would think that a nation able to fund hundreds of billions of dollars over and over again on emergency basis, would be able to place the same sense of urgency when it comes to saving their lives, their futures and their families, but they do not. You would think that knowing what the experts have been saying all along would hold more weight than rhetoric and slogans when it comes to the seriousness of this, but it didn't. The problem is they didn't think and they didn't care enough to think about any of our troops or what would happen to them when they became veterans or wounded veterans needing care.

But this was not the first warning I gave. There were many blogs and websites I had going back years. The strongest warning I gave came in 2002 when I published my book, For the Love of Jack, His War/My Battle. I wrote it before September 11, 2001 but could not find a publisher. After 9-11, I knew I had to do all I could to warn people what was coming as much as I needed to offer hope to the veterans and their families.

So when you read how shocking the news is on our veterans and PTSD, know that none of it had to happen if people with the power had known what I knew way back then.