Vietnam Veterans with Combat PTSD Major News Story, Again?

Combat Stress Among Veterans Is Found to Persist Since Vietnam on the New York Times left me scratching my head. How is this fact about Vietnam veterans living with PTSD a headline news story? After all, they pushed for research back in the 70's. Yes, that is how long major efforts to treat Combat PTSD have been going on. Then I got my answer.

"The new analysis, financed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, is part of the first effort to track a large, nationally representative sample of service members through their adult lives, and it is likely to have implications for post-traumatic stress treatment and disability-benefit programs for years to come, the authors said. Both issues have been hotly debated during the drawdown from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." NY Times

More money spent by the VA doing more "research" on something that has been done over and over and over again, meaning someone got the money. In this case, it was,

"Members of the research team will present the findings in a series of talks at the American Psychological Association in Washington." NY Times

RAND Corp took a look at what this group came up with before with "Comprehensive Soldier Fitness" and the other "programs" that didn't work. We saw the results in the number of suicides going up instead of down. The Army’s Flawed Resilience-Training Study: A Call for Retraction came out in 2012.

The largest of these new initiatives is the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) program, launched in 2009 and based upon the “positive psychology” framework of psychologist Martin Seligman. And that brings us to the bad news: despite the over-hyped claims of CSF’s leading proponents, at this point there is little evidence to suggest that CSF works.

After decades of living with and researching PTSD it was easy enough for me to figure out if the pushed this program they would make it worse and I was right.

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.

They didn't need to think they were mentally weak but that is what they were left believing. It is also the same message Generals ended up with and we saw that in the increase of bad conduct discharges, which, in most cases, turned out to be troops with PTSD, left with nothing after they were kicked out of the military. This is what they actually needed to hear. It is from Comprehensive Solider Fitness will make it worse

Ever notice the vast majority of the men and women you command end up carrying out the mission they are given, fighting fiercely and showing great courage even though they are already carrying the wound inside of them? They fulfill their duty despite flashbacks and nightmares draining them because their duty comes first to them. Do you understand how much that takes for them to do that? Yet you think telling them their minds are not tough enough will solve the problem? What kind of a tough mind do you think they needed to have to fight on despite this killing pain inside of them?

There are thousands of articles on what went wrong on Wounded Times. Most of them are about the reports from across the country when the failure produced more suicides, more veterans facing off with police and SWAT teams and more suffering instead of healing. Here is a flashback to something else the veterans community talks about, The Dark Side of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.

There seems to be reluctance and inconsistency among the CSF promoters in acknowledging that CSF is “research” and therefore should entail certain protections routinely granted to those who participate in research studies. Seligman explained to the APA’s Monitor on Psychology, “This is the largest study — 1.1 million soldiers — psychology has ever been involved in” (a “study” is a common synonym for “research project”). But when asked during an NPR interview whether CSF would be “the largest-ever experiment,” Brig. Gen. Cornum, who oversees the program, responded, “Well, we’re not describing it as an experiment. We’re describing it as training.” Despite the fact that CSF is incontrovertibly a research study, standard and important questions about experimental interventions like CSF are neither asked nor answered in the special issue. This neglect is all the more troubling given that the program is so massive and expensive, and the stakes are so high.

“This study shows us what the road ahead is going to look like,” said an author, Dr. Charles Marmar, chairman of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center and director of the NYU Cohen Veterans Center. “A significant number of veterans are going to have PTSD for a lifetime unless we do something radically different.” More than 18 percent of those with PTSD had died by retirement age, about twice the percentage of those without the disorder." NY Times

“We have funded lots of projects to improve PTSD treatment, but this study shows that we need to do better,” said F. Alex Chiu, of the office of research and development in the Department of Veterans Affairs. “We need to understand these chronic sufferers, and it’s going to be a learning process on our side.” NY Times

"That original study, an in-depth survey of 2,348 Vietnam veterans, found that about 30 percent of them had had PTSD at some point in the years since the war. By the late 1980s, when the survey ended, about 15 percent still qualified for the diagnosis, said Dr. Marmar, a principal investigator on both the original study and the follow-up." NY Times

More of what was wrong since the studies that had been mostly verified were from the 70's. We're in a worse place than we were back then because we're seeing all the bad numbers increasing faster than after Vietnam.