Army thinks redeploying PTSD soldiers is a good idea?

2008

Sgt. Coleman S. Bean will not be listed among the war dead. The 25-year-old Bean served two tours of duty in Iraq. He landed there with paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Division during the first days of the war, and saw combat duty in Northern Iraq. Upon returning home he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Despite the diagnosis, he was deployed to Iraq for a second time, returning home in May. A third deployment remained a possibility. Saturday night, following a car accident and a brief hospital stay, Bean returned to his home in South River and took his own life.

2011

Dr. David Jobes, a clinical psychologist and suicide expert who recently spoke at a Veterans Affairs conference in Louisville, said "the third deployment is the tipping point after which things begin to fall apart." Clinical psychologist and suicide expert Thomas Joiner, who also spoke in Louisville, proffers a theory that explains why individuals who feel like a burden to their loved ones and lack a sense of belonging to their community are especially vulnerable. This tendency is compounded when those who witness injury routinely and have developed fearlessness toward violence and harm may be at even higher risk for suicide.

2013

Six months before his deployment to Afghanistan, Capt. Anthony Martinez gravely doubted his ability to lead. He had post-traumatic stress disorder. He wasn’t sleeping at night and was barely holding it together during the day. He told his boss he couldn’t handle command of the battalion’s largest company. Senior noncommissioned officers asked leadership to remove Martinez. Six weeks before shipping off, Martinez threatened to kill himself. Then he wrote a formal memo detailing who should take over the company if he had a mental breakdown while in Afghanistan. The Army did nothing — except send him to war.

There are a lot more but you get the idea. Did they learn? Hell no. Did they learn in 2006 when the Army study showed the increase risk of PTSD with redeployments?

No. Now they seem proud of it.

In Afghanistan, redeployed U.S. soldiers still coping with demons of post-traumatic stress
Washington Post
By Kevin Sieff
Published: August 18, 2013

FORWARD OPERATING BASE ­ARIAN, Afghanistan — The soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division were among the first Americans to arrive in Afghanistan in 2001. Now, they will be some of the last to leave.

They have served as many as seven combat tours each, with the accompanying traumas — pulling a friend’s body from a charred vehicle, watching a rocket tear through a nearby barracks, learning from e-mail that a marriage was falling apart.

But a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder is not a barrier to being redeployed. Not when the Army needs its most experienced soldiers to wrap up the war. Instead, the Army is trying to answer a new question: Who is resilient enough to return to Afghanistan, in spite of the demons they are still fighting?

As the Army has knowingly redeployed soldiers with symptoms of PTSD — and learned of the remarkable coping skills of some — it is now regularly embedding psychologists with units in the field. They are treating men and women recovering from 12 years of relentless combat, even as the soldiers continue to fight.
read more here