Fort Hood Gunman in Crisis Long Before Shooting

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
April 6, 2014

Since last week there has been a flood of online articles about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder related to combat. The problem is, most of them are missing a lot of details. People are doing a hell of a lot of guessing, in the process, they slam soldiers because the only people they are talking to are leaders in the military. Taking responsibility for suicides and attempted suicides by enlisted personnel is not something they have been forced to do. As for veterans, no one even asks leaders how they could have failed the troops so miserably they ended up with a higher risk to their lives out of combat than during it.

Faced with a growing number of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder cases in the armed forces, the U.S. Army will begin a program this summer to proactively address the problem by focusing on building the mental resilience of its personnel.

In a speech before the international affairs organization the Atlantic Council on Thursday, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey laid out the virtues of the newly formed initiative, which he called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.

"We have been looking very hard at ways to develop coping skills and resilience in soldiers, and we will be coming out in July with a new program called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness," said Casey. "And what we will attempt to do is raise mental fitness to the same level that we now give to physical fitness. Because it is scientifically proven, you can build resilience."

"The whole idea here is to give soldiers the skills they need to increase their resilience and enhance their performance," he went on. "A lot of people think that everybody who goes to combat gets post-traumatic stress. That's not true. Everybody that goes to combat gets stressed. There is no doubt about it. But the vast majority of people who go to combat have a growth experience because they are exposed to something very, very difficult and they prevail. So the issue for us is how do we give more people the skills so that more people have a growth experience... We thought it was important to get started on this because everything else involves you treating the problem. We need to be more proactive."

That is a problem because it was not "scientifically proven" when the Army started to push it. It was based on a research project for school-aged kids to give them a better sense of self-worth. Rand Corp took a good hard look at this and found that it did not fit with military culture and even if it did, there was no evidence that anyone could be taught to be resilient. All of this is in THE WARRIOR SAW, SUICIDES AFTER WAR.

While it may seem that this report was a recent one, the appalling thing is that it was from a 2009 report about Comprehensive Soldier Fitness and every soldier has been exposed to this training that was suppose to make them "resilient" to the point where leaders never thought of how this has failed. The evidence is in the deplorable results.

When brass says that most of the soldiers committing suicide had not been deployed, they don't seem willing to mention the fact that even those soldiers had been "trained" to be resilient. Given that it didn't work on them, how could they ever think it would work on deployed soldiers facing combat traumas over and over again?

Reporters have been so lazy on all of this that when this "program" was announced all I did was take the data we already knew from other news reports released over the years to know that they were heading in a very dangerous direction. I posted this warning that if they pushed CSF they would increase suicides.

If you promote this program the way Battlemind was promoted, count on the numbers of suicides and attempted suicides to go up instead of down. It's just one more deadly mistake after another and just as dangerous as sending them into Iraq without the armor needed to protect them.

Fort Hood Shooter’s Psychiatric Breakdown began before the shootings but as the military brass avoids mentioning the failures of their mental health efforts, Lopez is only one more case of what went wrong.

A month before opening fire on other soldiers Ivan Lopez made a Facebook post showing he was a man in crisis. KTRH report this on April 4, 2014

Ivan Lopez was a man about to snap on March 1 when he posted on his Facebook page, “I have just lost my inner peace, full of hatred, I think this time the devil will take me. I was robbed last night and I am sure it was 2 ‘flacos’. Green light and finger ready. As easy as that.”

Reporters are doing the same thing. The Washington Post has another story about the lack of mental health providers with this quote.

None of Lopez’s known issues suggest he was at risk for committing violence, and military leaders have said there were no warning signs.

There were warning signs. How could mental health professionals miss something like this? Are they supposed to read every Facebook post written by soldiers seeking psychiatric care? No but if they are in crisis shouldn't their evaluations have found the state of his mind? Shouldn't they have actually known what they were treating him for when they put him on medications?

The military brass seem to be confused on a lot of things. They say Lopez "self reported" PTSD. That in itself is a problem since he was given medication before being diagnosed with it. What was he on medication for? Do they make it a habit of giving medications without knowing what condition the soldier has?

We know that PTSD comes after traumatic events and there is a long list of them so it is possible that Lopez did in fact have PTSD from life itself and the loss of two family members. It happens. He could have had it from his years in the National Guards and it could have been caused by being a truck driver in Iraq with IEDs blowing up other truck drivers. There are so many possibilities but none of them have really been ruled out.

As military leaders back away from any responsibility, reporters have been even worse. They end up making all veterans with PTSD appear to be dangerous when the fact is, they are more apt to take their own lives than harm anyone else. With about 23 million veterans in this country there are relatively few reports of them committing crimes but far too many reports of them taking their own lives. While attempted suicides are a lot higher than completed ones, reporters have failed to provide proper attention to them even though reports of 1,000 a month in the VA system alone have been screaming for attention since Veterans for Common Sense filed a lawsuit. They had to do that because Dr. Iraq Katz was denying a crisis in the VA at the same time Norma Perez sent an email suggesting that counselors diagnose fewer post-traumatic stress disorder cases in soldiers.

In most cases, it isn't PTSD that makes soliders/veterans dangerous, it is some mental health "professionals" mistreating them with medications they had been warned to not use, using medications when they don't know what they are really treating, as in the case of Lopez being given medications but not diagnosed with PTSD. It is also due to reporters lacking the ability to actually read what other reporters have done in the past.

Veterans have been doomed to suffer history being repeated because no one has been held accountable for any of this. Now we read there is a still a lack of mental health providers in the military. Pretty pathetic but they just didn't notice.

Military’s mental-health system faces shortage of providers, lack of good diagnostic tools
Washington Post
By Sandhya Somashekhar and Ellen Nakashima
Published: April 5, 2014

The shooting rampage at Fort Hood has once again focused attention on the military’s ­mental-health system, which, despite improvement efforts, has struggled to address a tide of psychological problems brought on by more than a decade of war.

Military leaders have tried to understand and deal with mounting troop suicides, worrying psychological disorders among returning soldiers, and high-profile violent incidents on military installations such as the one that left four people dead and more than 16 injured at the Army post in Texas on Wednesday.

But experts say problems persist. A nationwide shortage of mental-health providers has made it difficult for the military to hire enough psychiatrists and counselors. The technology and science for reliably identifying people at risk of doing harm to themselves or others are lacking.

Officials have yet to identify a motive behind the actions of the Fort Hood shooter, Army Spec. Ivan A. Lopez, who took his own life. But they have said he was taking medications for anxiety and depression.

Lopez had reported sustaining a traumatic brain injury and was being screened for post-traumatic stress disorder, which is thought to affect as many as 20 percent of veterans of recent wars.