Too many reporters write about PTSD but don't know about it

Too many reporters write about PTSD but don't know about it
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
January 14, 2013

There are times when I am sure a "reporter" gets assigned PTSD stories and has to come up with something so they come up with anything. This very well could be one of those cases. I have no clue what background this person has other than what is on the site, but when she wrote about how the contractors "get no treatment" that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

There is a thing called "workman's comp" and that is in the article further down but while civilian defense contractor employees do make a hell of a lot more money than our troops do, they also get more benefits. Collecting a workman's comp check is a lot easier than getting the VA to cover a claim. Sure, they get free care for a while after they are discharged, but getting care is not the same as getting the compensation they need to live off of when they cannot work. Then there is Social Security Disability coverage for PTSD.

The problem is that civilian employees need to see trauma specialists and not just psychologists or they will not heal. They are just as human as the troops are, so it is the same story for them as well. If they see a mental healthcare worker who is not, repeat, not a trauma specialist, then it can do more harm than good.

My advice to them is simple. Learn all they can about PTSD and combat even tough they are not doing the fighting because they are exposed to some of the same type of events, long times away from home and family and face a readjustment time when they come home. They still had to worry about an IED in the road or an RPG finding them just as much as bullet could have.

My advice to reporters having to write something about this is also simple. Know what you are writing about before you do it. PTSD is very complicated but if you know enough about it, you will know what needs to be in the article you write and be a better judge on what is important.

Veterans and PTSD: Iraq and Afghanistan Civilian Contractors Get No Treatment

Policymic
Heather Beaven

The external causes of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are well known. People who have been subject to violence or the aftermath of violence are susceptible to find that their brains actually change. But this is where science gets a bit fuzzy. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine,

PTSD changes the body's response to stress. It affects the stress hormones and chemicals that carry information between the nerves (neurotransmitters). It is not known why traumatic events cause PTSD in some people but not others.

Noted PTSD expert, Dr. Jonathan Shay, calls PTSD "the valid adaptations in the mind and body to the real situation of other people trying to kill you." Dr. Shay calls it a moral injury and has written two books on how to protect against PTSD and how to help warriors’ transition back into civilian life.
read more here

It is known why some "get it" and some don't and if Shay's work was taken seriously on this article, she would have understood what he said. "Moral wound" and that means when they can feel things more deeply, then they can also suffer more deeply. The rate of PTSD has been quoted as 1 out of 3 for the longest time and now it is 1 out out of 5, but I'll trust the experts doing this work the longest. The other factor is the number of "traumatic events" has to be included in. The Army discovered in research that redeployment increases the risk of PTSD. It is not the numbers of men and women being sent but the numbers exposed to traumatic events that matter and how many times it has happened.

The time between event and help is also part of it. Civilians exposed to traumatic events usually see a trauma specialist afterwards. If it is a huge event involving many people, then teams of crisis intervention specialists show up to help survivors. Getting them to talk or being there to listen helps get healing happening sooner. If after 30 days the experience does not get weaker, they usually need more help to heal than just "waiting to get over it." The same cannot be said for troops deployed into Afghanistan, just as with Iraq, because one event is followed by many more and most of the time they cannot find someone to talk to until they are back home and even then, they have to wait in a long line to get it. What makes matters worse for them is they deny they need help because they want to get back home to their families and not held up.

They get the notion that if they "got over it the last time" they can do it again ignoring the fact that the "last time" was followed up by another event and they had that one piled on top of the first one. There is always one they focus on more than others but it is not always the one that started the invasion of their lives.

A Gulf War veteran contacted me as a DEA agent. He thought he had gotten over all the things that happened to him during the war but was shocked to discover he hadn't. He told me he had been through a lot of things in his life but after his brother was killed in action in Iraq, he fell apart. He was afraid to see a psychologist because he loved his job and was afraid of losing it but he was also afraid he couldn't "get over" what he was going through alone. I told him he should pay out of his pocket if he had to but he had to see someone soon. There was only so much I could do for him other than getting him to understand that it was the death of his brother that brought out what was already there. He came to understand what PTSD is why it hit "even someone like him" as hard as it did.

Recent reports of two Navy SEALS committing suicide, one confirmed as suicide while the other remains "suspected" is a clear indication that no one is so tough they do not feel what they have been through. Then there is Medal of Honor Hero Dakota Meyer writing in his book about how he also tried to take his own life but thankfully that is something he did not succeed in doing. Yet while all this is happening the military suicide prevention efforts have a surplus of unspent funds.

We know that for all the money spent repeating research that was done 40 years ago along with attempt after attempt has been wasted for the most part when we still see the number of suicides along with attempted suicides rise for active military as well as veterans even with the suicide prevention hotline taking in tens of thousands of calls with a reported rescue data base at 30,000, the latest veterans suicide report is that there are at least 22 veterans a day taking their own lives. It is wise to use "at least" simply because there are many unknowns such as drug overdoses and vehicle deaths. Most of the time we simply don't know if they are really accidents, occurred in response to un-diagnosed PTSD issues such as flashbacks and short term memory loss when they cannot remember if they took their pills or not or if they were in fact suicides. Oh, there's really a tricky one for you there. The fact is, we will never really know how many are taking their own lives because of questionable deaths and the other factor of less than half of the veterans needing help for PTSD seek it, meaning they are not diagnosed but usually have it all the same.

If you are guess that this article matters for the wrong reason, it does. We should all be angry about what is happening because none of it has to happen. Too many times we've read stories that are not written with a true knowledge of what is really going on so they give us a couple of paragraphs fished out of the sea of articles printed while hoping to land the big one. In doing so, they never seem to notice the obvious. There are far too many sinking to the bottom.

I am sure the reporter of the story on contractors had the right intentions but got the message wrong. I could have just avoided this, the way I do with many articles but this one involved civilians sent into combat zones and they do have a huge problem that has gone on for far too long but this one really got to me.