PTSD: The battle after the war

PTSD: The battle after the war

Edmonds woman starts support group for veterans

By Mina Williams
Enterprise editor

EDMONDS -- For armed services men and women returning stateside, fear can become a ghost haunting them in daily life, more frightening than the firestorms and improvised explosive devices they encountered abroad. For these veterans, a new war begins at home with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

“Admitting you have PTSD is like admitting you are a bad soldier,” said Dedie Davis, an Edmonds resident and wife of a veteran. Davis' husband asked not to be identified.

Watching her husband struggle to adjust to life in Edmonds spurred her to create Operation Open Arms in 2006. The relief and support network is for veterans with PTSD, an anxiety disorder triggered by witnessing events that cause intense fear, and others suffering from post-combat angst.

Although the organization has been supported through casual donations, Davis is spearheading an event Sept. 1o aimed at raising funds to provide support for veterans with PTSD.
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PTSD The battle after the war

also you can watch the video I made.

PTSD Final battle of war

After war, the price they pay goes on. They gave their best to us. Isn't it time to return the favor and do our best for them?

PTSD Final battle of war

This is the newest video I did on PTSD. Aside from these faces, there are more who are still alive, still fighting the battle to stay alive. They are the reason I do what I do. They are the reason thousands of others do what they do. Their lives are worth saving no matter what it takes and it's about time we did it. Vietnam veterans still lose their battles with PTSD and so do Gulf War veterans, just as the Korean veterans and all other veterans before them did. We have no excuses left. We've been at this for too many years to excuse the failures of this country when it comes to those who serve it. Everyday more veterans take their own lives.

As you watch the video, remember the stories behind the faces of just some of the warriors we've lost that should still be here.

The tragic death earlier this month of a 26-year-old Navy veteran who hung himself with an electrical cord while under the care of a Spokane, Washington Veterans Administration hospital depression underscores what veterans advocacy groups say is evidence of an epidemic of suicides due failures by the VA to identify and treat war veterans afflicted with severe mental health problems.

Lucas Senescall, who suffered from severe depression, was the sixth veteran who committed suicide this year after seeking treatment at the Spokane VA, according to a report published last weekend in the Spokesman Review.

Senescall’s father said his son was “begging for help and [the VA] kicked him to the curb,” according to the July 20 report in the Spokesman Review.
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http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4525&Itemid=81

Marine Chad Oligschlaeger lost fight against PTSD
At Memorial Day: Another Iraq Vet, With PTSD, Suicide

Posted May 25, 2008 09:01 AM (EST)On Memorial Day weekend, yet another American family is mourning the death of son who survived the war in Iraq -- only to fall victim at home from post traumatic shock disorder.The family lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, and the Marine was Chad Oligschlaeger, age 21, who committed suicide this week at the Twenty Nine Palms base in California.While the cause of his death is still being investigated, family members say he was taking eight different types of medications to deal with post traumatic stress disorder after serving two tours in Iraq.

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Wednesday, September 19, 2007

From Queens to Kuwait, Where a Life Was Ended
Sgt. Denise A. Lannaman fatally shot herself in Kuwait last year.From Queens to Kuwait, Where a Life Was Ended

In the space of three months last year, three members of the U.S. Army who had been part of a logistics group in Kuwait committed suicide. Two of them — a colonel and a major — had power over contract awards and had been accused of taking bribes just before they killed themselves.The third was Sgt. Denise A. Lannaman of Queens. In a war that has cost the lives of more than 3,700 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, the death of one woman by her own hand has attracted little attention beyond the circle of shattered family and friends.Yet those who know her say that questions about Sergeant Lannaman’s death remain unsettled, and go well beyond psychic agonies that she struggled with her entire life. “From the day she was born, she was different,” Barbara Lannaman, her mother, said. “Life was just not satisfactory to her.”

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Saturday, September 1, 2007

WOUNDS OF WAR Mental troubles plagued man before suicide

WOUNDS OF WAR

For one veteran, struggle didn't end

Mental troubles plagued man before suicide

By Laura Ungarlungar@courier-journal.comThe Courier-Journal

RELATED VIDEO: Derek Henderson Interviews

Derek Henderson's hands shook as he held the railing on the Clark Memorial Bridge and stared down at the dark waters of the Ohio River.A few feet away stood Aisha "Nikki" McGuire and her boyfriend, Patrick Craig, who had spotted Henderson while driving by. They begged him not to jump -- "It's not worth it," they said.Henderson wouldn't say what brought him there. "I don't want to talk about it," he told Craig, before climbing over the railing and hanging for a moment off the other side.

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Jason Cooper

When he went to the VA, they didn't have room to treat him that day," said the mother of Jason Cooper, an Army reservist in the Iraq war. Jason hung himself four months after coming back to Iowa. He was 23
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/49226/

Joshua Omvig

After a long-fought battle, the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act (H.R. 327) overcame its last congressional hurdle Tuesday when it passed in the House for the second time by a vote of 417-0.
Introduced by Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-3rd District, the bill directs the Department of Veterans Affairs to develop and implement a comprehensive program addressing suicide prevention. The bill is named after Joshua Omvig, from Grundy Center, Iowa, an Iraq War veteran who served in the Army Reserve and took his own life in December 2005 after an 11-month deployment.
http://iowaindependent.com/1324/after-long-fought-battle-veterans-suicide-prevention-bill-passes

Army Reservist Lance Waldorf totes a child while serving in Afghanistan in 2004. The financial consultant was expecting orders for a third tour. (Waldorf family photo)

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Major Lance Waldorf, suicide spotlights toll of repeated deployments

Michigan veteran's suicide spotlights toll of repeated deployments

Oralandar Brand-Williams / The Detroit News

HOLLY TOWNSHIP -- Lana Waldorf took calls from concerned family and friends Wednesday evening and tried to make sense of her husband's apparent suicide in a military cemetery in Oakland County.

Lance Waldorf, a 40-year-old major in the U.S. Army Reserve and a resident of Bingham Farms, was found dead Monday afternoon of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the Great Lakes National Cemetery in Holly Township."The war had a great deal to do with this," said Lana Waldorf, about her husband's death.Waldorf said her husband suffered from post-traumatic stress and increasing depression after returning home from serving as a civil affairs specialist in Afghanistan.

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http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/2008/06/major-lance-waldorf-suicide-spotlights.html

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Sgt. Brian Rand worth training but not worth saving

Since the start of the Iraq war, Fort Campbell, a sprawling installation on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, has seen a spike in the number of suicides and soldiers suffering from severe post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Sgt. Brian Rand, shown here grilling chicken in Iraq, killed himself a few months after being discharged from his second tour of duty in Iraq. Rand believe he was being haunted by the ghost of the Iraqi man he killed.

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Saturday, June 21, 2008

Camp Pendleton 80% PTSD at Wounded Warrior Battalion
"Eighty percent of our residents have some degree of PTSD," Lawhorne said, referring to the disorder that requires counseling and group therapy in mild cases and more intensive psychiatric treatment and medications in its more severe form. "At the same time, we're seeing a lot more TBI cases."
MILITARY: Treating the troopsWounded Warrior Battalion focuses on injured Marines and sailorsBy MARK WALKER - Staff Writer Friday, June 20, 2008 5:13 PM PDTCAMP PENDLETON ---- Nearly three years and 14 surgeries after the right side of his body was torn apart by shrapnel in a roadside bombing in Iraq, Marine Sgt. Sean Webster is working to save his military career.After he was injured, he had visions of becoming a drill instructor; now, he'd be grateful for a job training fellow Marines in some less-intensive discipline."My goal is to stay in the Marine Corps on limited duty," the 23-year-old Virginia native said during a Wednesday interview at the base. "What I'd really like to do is stay as a staff member here."
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Borne on the 4th of July: Wounded Iraq Vet Who Helped Others a Likely Suicide

By Greg Mitchell Published: July 04, 2008 12:10 PM ET
NEW YORK Sean Webster was helping other severely wounded Iraq vets cope with their injuries but, in the end, apparently could not quite save himself. For the past year, Sgt. Sean Webster, 23, had worked in Wounded Warrior Battalion at Camp Pendleton, aiding sailors and Marines wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan get much-needed medical and psychological care. Just two weeks ago he was featured in a front-page story on this effort in the local North County Times newspaper. "I'm a wounded Marine and I know what these guys are going through,'" he said.Webster had been severely injured by an anti-tank mine explosion in September 2005 and underwent 14 surgeries on an arm and a leg. The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday: "At the Wounded Warrior Battalion, he felt at home. He was the barracks manager and provided encouragement to the other guys, urging them not to get despondent. Forty-one troops live at the barracks. Staffers are tracking another 600 to make sure they're getting appropriate help."Like many wounded Marines, Webster wanted to remain in the Corps. 'What I'd really like to do is stay as a staff member here,' he told the newspaper."On June 23, Webster's body was found in an isolated part of the base. It was quickly ruled not an accident and homicide was not immediately ruled out. But now the Naval Criminal Investigate Service is probing the death as a "probable" suicide. There is a veritable epidemic of suicides among Iraq vets these days.
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http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003824506

PTSD FINAL BATTLE OF WAR

The final battle of war is not fought with guns or helicopters or jets flying through the air. It is not fought with a uniform specifying branch of service. It is being fought in homes across America, on the streets by the homeless and in the hospitals. It is being fought by veterans of war.

We tally the dead on a daily basis from Iraq and Afghanistan. We try to track those who die back on our land from wounds they received serving overseas. Yet we never really know the true price paid because it can be paid in silent suffering, in families not knowing how to save them and in the eyes of those who try to serve them at the hospitals, clinics and shelters.

After Vietnam, the number of dead was counted and their names engraved on the black stone of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, yet if the truthful accounting had been attempted, a couple of hundred thousand names would have to be added to it. By 1986 117,000 Vietnam veterans had committed suicide. They are still committing suicide. They are still dying from Agent Orange exposure as well. Other studies place the number of Vietnam veterans committing suicide between 150,000 and 200,000, but even these numbers experts agree could be lower than reality. Considering most of America has yet to come to terms with the price paid, they do not link the death of a veteran with service in war. Too often we think, "well it was just one year and so long ago" but we fail to see while they left war, the war did not leave them.

Today we see it all being repeated in the eyes of the veterans of today. Over thirty years later, we still have not gotten it right for their sake.

The song I chose for this is American Anthem by Norah Jones from Ken Burns The War. It says, "America I gave my best to you" and we need to ask ourselves if they deserve the same from us. Can we look them in the eye and tell them we gave our best to them when we let them suffer? When we let the stigma of stupid people stand in the way of them getting the help they need to heal? When we still have mothers burying their sons and daughters because the events of war cut them so deeply they could not heal on their own? Can we really? Have we even tried to come close to being able to do it?

We need to get this right for their sake. For all the generations who came before them and also paid the price with the wound inside of them. Each generation of warrior had the same wounds of war since the beginning of time. We owe it to all of them.

The new video is over on the side bar.