Texans Spin On PTSD Chair

Flawed PTSD research under fire from Texas legislators
Dallas Morning News
Sue Ambrose
Staff Writer
Published: 12 October 2015

The contracts for the PTSD research wouldn’t have been included in the committee’s inquiry, since the money came in three phases, each less than $1 million.

Texas lawmakers are saying they’d like to know why a state agency spent $2 million for a flawed research project on veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

But the head of the Health and Human Services Commission says that would be tough. Many people involved with funding the research — which included spinning combat veterans in a chair to stimulate their brains — no longer work at the agency.

That makes “a comprehensive timeline difficult to re-create,” Chris Traylor, executive commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, wrote in a letter responding to one lawmaker’s questions. The agency also gave him hundreds of pages of documents previously requested by The Dallas Morning News and KXAS-TV (NBC5) as part of their five-month investigation into the research.

That didn’t sit well with Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, who now wants an internal investigation.

“I am requesting … a full forensic reconstruction of the events surrounding the decisions,” Turner, a member of the House ethics committee, wrote last week in a letter to Traylor.
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