They lost their will to live

They lost their will to live
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
January 21, 2014

In 2010 the Army spent $17 million on Suicide Research. Sounded good at the time. At least it did if you did not read the rest of the report or track the outcome. Why? Because the article points out that this money was not for researching suicides but to figure out what programs were working. You know, the programs they had already funded in the first place.

They spent this money right after spending "$50 million study of suicide and mental health involving about 500,000 service members and four other research institutions." Just with these two "studies" $67 million dollars topped off with more suicides.

Wise investment? Hardly but this money was only a fraction of the funds wasted. Change that. Not just wasted. It is much more disgusting than that. They basically buried the money when they buried all the men and women suddenly discovering that while they were willing to risk their lives for someone else in combat, they were not given what they needed to heal because of it. They lost their will to live.

Or be willing to lay down their lives.

The Gazette out of Colorado had an article about two professors new book claiming that "more U.S. combat veterans are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in the U.S. than anywhere else because the condition has become a "cultural phenomena."

"Sarah Hautzinger, a Colorado College associate professor of anthropology, and Jean Scandlyn, a University of Colorado at Denver research associate professor of health and behavioral sciences and anthropology" you can find the title to on the link. Nothing against anthropology professors (My favorite TV show is Bones) but the issue is not just in the US. We've already read about what is happening in Canada, the UK and Australia. We have more veterans with PTSD because we have more veterans.

This morning I opened my email discovering a link to an article on TIME about Vietnam veterans addicted to heroin. I cried. I cried for my husband's nephew who was the same young age of 19 when both of them were in Vietnam. My husband came home with PTSD and so did his nephew. While my husband and I have been married for almost 30 years, his nephew came home addicted to heroin. In and out of trouble, he finally cleaned up his life. We were all hopeful he'd finally be happy enough that life was not worse than combat. We were wrong. He checked himself into a motel room after buying enough heroin to kill ten men. It only had to kill one.

The War Within: Portraits of Vietnam Veterans Fighting Heroin Addiction
LIFE
Tara Thean

Sonny Martin was just 23 when he returned home from Vietnam with a grim souvenir of his stint in uniform: a heroin addiction. Martin turned to the drug to help stave off the memory of his time in Southeast Asia, where he had bribed villagers for information that would help him identify and “eliminate” Viet Cong collaborators. Back in the States, he found few people willing to help heal the invisible wounds that remained from his time in that brutal war.

“I had to keep it all inside,” Martin said in a July 1971 LIFE magazine story that illuminated the struggles — and addictions — short-circuiting so many veterans’ return to civilian life. According to the LIFE article, “the number of addicts is still not confirmed. Congressman Robert Steele (R-Conn.) and many returning veterans estimate that 15 percent of the men in Vietnam are hooked on heroin. The military claims the figure is 2 percent.” Whatever the actual numbers, it didn’t help that the drug was so easy to find: just two bucks would secure a fix of high-grade smack — a high that, for a while, blunted the anxiety, shock, and loneliness that defined so many veterans’ post-war lives.

Here, on the heels of recent reports about the enormous difficulties (joblessness, horrific suicide rates and more) facing American veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, LIFE.com recalls that long-ago magazine article, and the all-too-familiar stories of young men struggling to put their lives back together after serving their country in a divisive, seemingly endless conflict.

In 1971, addicted veterans who wanted to kick their heroin habit could check into places like Ward 4B2 of the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital in California. There, doctors and nurses used the synthetic opiate methadone to “buy them time” while experimenting with one-on-one and small-group therapy sessions, urging the men to turn their problems inside out and tackle them head on. But veterans couldn’t just walk into Palo Alto and hope for a cure: they had to demonstrate a genuine commitment to their own recovery. That meant tough times for men like 22-year-old Dan Patterson (see gallery above), who snorted heroin on a trip to town after he’d been admitted to the Palo Alto program. The doctors and nurses voted: he was out. He could come back when he was serious about helping himself.

Hoping to see more places like Ward 4B2, in 1971 the Nixon administration set aside $14 million to put 13 more programs in place before the end of the year. The new programs looked to Ward 4B2 for guidance; but 4B2 was, of course, very much still feeling its way forward. It wasn’t clear whether the drug-and-therapy combination could truly wean an addict off of both methadone — which is itself addictive — and heroin.
read more here

Did you notice the year? $14 million in 1971. Think about that for a moment. That is how long the ravages of combat have not only claimed lives but since reports started to surface about PTSD and substance abuse, 43 years ago.

People have a very strange reaction when I mention that research has been going on that long. It isn't that people didn't know about it but you'd have to be subscribing to all the magazines and newspapers from all over the country to learn since no one had computers back then. In the 80's I had to go to the library. I was just an average 23 year old when I met my husband, so I didn't have a clue when my Dad, a Korean Veteran, said the words "shell shock" after meeting him. That was what they called it before Vietnam veterans pushed for all the research into the cause as well as what could be done to save the lives of the men and women sent to Vietnam.

Nothing we see today is new. In the last 40 years billions have been spent and most of it wasted on what does not work because researchers decided they would redo what had already been done. They ignored the data in the process they also ignored what did work leaving veterans on this side of the ground instead of under it.

In 1984 Point Man International Ministries started out of Seattle Washington because a "Seattle Police Officer and Vietnam Veteran Bill Landreth noticed he was arresting the same people each night, he discovered most were Vietnam vets like himself that just never seemed to have quite made it home. He began to meet with them in coffee shops and on a regular basis for fellowship and prayer. Soon, Point Man Ministries was conceived and became a staple of the Seattle area."

Even back then it was known that small groups worked best because like in combat, it was a unit watching the backs of brothers and Point Man repeated what worked. That closeness meant the veteran mattered and was not lost in the crowd.

Healing Combat PTSD has to come in three parts. Mind-body-spirit or they do not really heal. There is no cure however if the whole of the veteran is treated, they live better lives.

Mind means psychological help and often medication but it also means substance abuse has to stop. Self medicating only makes it worse but veterans have a hard time understanding that. Often medication has to be changed until the right kind is found for the individual veteran. If they do not tell their psychiatrist they are having problems with the medication so it can be changed, they just stop taking it and most of the time give up on therapy.

They need to take care of their bodies to relearn how to calm down again. Usually this is done with meditation, yoga, martial arts, sports and something as simple as just taking a walk.

They also have to take care of their spirit because if they do not, they do not heal properly. They do not make peace with what some yahoo scientist is trying to remove from their brain taking everything else with those memories including the painful moment they lost a friend of took a life. Spiritual healing helps them forgive themselves if they have survivor guilt and forgive others including the other humans that tried to kill them. It helps them see that even in the horrific moments of combat, God was there all along. He does not mess with freewill and does not take sides other than the side of the individual. Whenever they cared, weeped, held out a hand or put an arm around one of the men they were with, God was there. The fact they had so much goodness inside of them to grieve afterwards came from the very part of them that hurts the most.

So I'll sit here for a while, think of all the wasted years as the number of suicides goes up and still wonder what it will take for this country to fully understand that when a man or woman survives combat but not survive being back home, too many "experts" really suck at their jobs.