Military using unproven programs to take on mental illness

The reports on CSF failures have been all over the internet lately. The problem is, much of what is being report has been wrong. I left this comment on PBS.

It was called "Battlemind" and the drop in suicides had more to do with the reduction of forces than anything else. The Army discharge 11,000 for "misconduct" in 2013 plus had discharged many more as a way of reducing the size of the Army. All branches did the same thing so as we look at the number of suicides, we must factor in everything. CSF actually prevents them from seeking help because they blame themselves of not training right and, as they see it, being mentally weak. I warned about this in 2009 but couldn't get anyone in power to listen.

Read THE WARRIOR SAW, SUICIDES AFTER WAR by Kathie Costos and know what was known all along. Everything in this book on military suicides came from government and news reports. It was all available to the public, but no one told them they had the power to change what was happening.

Military using unproven programs to take on mental illness
PBS News Hour
February 23, 2014

TRANSCRIPT
HARI SREENIVASAN: It’s estimated that nearly a thousand additional Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder every week. A report out Thursday by the Institute of Medicine said that despite dozens of programs by the military to help treat the mental illnesses that veterans suffer, few of them are proving effective. For more we’re joined by Gregg Zoroya of USA Today who has been covering this story. So the Department of Defense asked for this review, what did it find?

GREGG ZOROYA: Well it really was a review that was, the request was really built on something that happened last year. The Institute of Medicine had completed a four-year review of just how prevalent the problem was and they found that the numbers of folks that were ill were really kind of getting so large that both the Pentagon and the V.A. were having trouble staying ahead of it. So the Pentagon asked for this report. They wanted to know — we’ve got prevention programs out there, why aren’t they working? And essentially what this panel, from the Institute of Medicine, found was that while some of these ideas in theory made sense when they were introduced earlier in the war, that there really hadn’t been a strong enough effort by the Pentagon and by some of the branches to try to understand whether through some real strong scientific research whether the programs worked. And they found that in fact, they hadn’t.
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