Anderson hears calling to help homeless vets
By Alexa Hinton
Janet Robinson has no feeling in her fingers. And, when she holds out her hands, her thick, weathered fingers fall into a limp, gnarled curl.
It's one of the many indelible marks scarring the woman after she lived two years homeless on the streets of Nashville. It happened when, while shuffling along Murfreesboro Road, Robinson was pushed viciously by muggers and fell to her hands. The force when she struck the ground was too much for fingers weakened by seasons of cold temperatures and little protection, and she never regained sensation.
“They got my purse, but wasn’t nothing in it,” Robinson said.
Though her bag was empty, the 50-year-old Texas native says she had once considered her life full. Robinson served three years in the Army as a combat medic and hearing technician. She worked many years as a home health care nurse. She raised two boys, Jesse, now 20, and Josh, now 24.
“I wouldn’t ever have dreamed I’d become homeless. Heck, I used to make good money,” Robinson said.
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Monday, November 26, 2007
New Effort to Help Homeless Veterans
New Effort to Help Homeless Veterans
Reported by: Herryn Herzog
Email: HerrynHerzog@woai.com Last Update: 11/20 5:55 pm
About a fourth of all homeless people are veterans. News 4 is uncovering what is being done to get a handle on the problem and hopefully solve it.
Kenneth Ballantine served in the Marine Corps from 1975 through 1978. Now he is homeless
"Poor personal decisions and choices, alcohol and drugs," said Ballantine.
Bill Tompkins is another homeless veteran. He says there is help out there, but the problem remains.
"It's just often they don't reach those that could use it," said Tompkins.
"They've been there for us when we needed them. We need to be there now that they're in need," said Congressman Ciro Rodriguez.
Rodriguez says we have failed our homeless vets.
Reported by: Herryn Herzog
Email: HerrynHerzog@woai.com Last Update: 11/20 5:55 pm
About a fourth of all homeless people are veterans. News 4 is uncovering what is being done to get a handle on the problem and hopefully solve it.
Kenneth Ballantine served in the Marine Corps from 1975 through 1978. Now he is homeless
"Poor personal decisions and choices, alcohol and drugs," said Ballantine.
Bill Tompkins is another homeless veteran. He says there is help out there, but the problem remains.
"It's just often they don't reach those that could use it," said Tompkins.
"They've been there for us when we needed them. We need to be there now that they're in need," said Congressman Ciro Rodriguez.
Rodriguez says we have failed our homeless vets.
Sonny Iovino's death causes action for homeless veterans
Iowa City group seeks to raise funds for homeless veterans
Associated Press - November 22, 2007 11:14 AM ET
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) - An Iowa City group has teamed with a local bank to provide assistance for homeless veterans. The move comes two weeks after one died of hypothermia under a bridge.
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Nursing the mental scars of war in UK too little, too late for too many
Nursing the mental scars of war
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 26/11/2007
The Government is unveiling a new scheme to help soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But for one widow, it is too little too late, Glenda Cooper finds
'Imagine your worst day and multiply it by a thousand," was how Captain Ken Masters described his time in Basra to his wife Alison. "In Bosnia and Afghanistan I felt I was doing some good. Here it's different."
'Imagine your worst day': Captain Ken Masters killed himself in Iraq
Four days before he was due to leave Iraq he walked into his small barrack room at Waterloo Lines military camp and hanged himself.
"He was out there looking after his men; why was no one looking after him?" his wife asks now.
Capt Masters is one of 17 serving personnel posted to Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed suicide; one in 10 of those who have died in these two conflicts have taken their own lives.
According to the Ministry of Defence's own figures, of 1,158 serving personnel who developed mental health problems - such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), stress-related disturbance and depression - between January and March this year, 499 had been in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Other figures show that the number of reservists sent to Iraq who suffer mental problems has doubled since 2003.
The last military psychiatric hospital, the Duchess of Kent in Yorkshire, was closed after a review in the 1990s. The MoD says it is accepted as best practice to treat service personnel with mental health disorders in the NHS in conjunction with the Priory group of clinics.
It spent £3.4 million on 307 such patients in 2006-07. However, on Friday the Government announced that it was also unrolling a pilot scheme across six sites in Britain that will provide trained mental health therapists for veterans.
The mental scars of war have always been with us. The veterans of the First World War called the symptoms they brought home shell shock; the Second World War generation talked about "going psycho".
Today, the buzz word is ''post-traumatic stress disorder", a term describing a severe reaction to an extreme psychological trauma.
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Sunday, November 25, 2007
Ecstasy Trials Was it a fluke -- or the future?
The Peace Drug
Post-traumatic stress disorder had destroyed Donna Kilgore's life. Then experimental therapy with MDMA, a psychedelic drug better known as ecstasy, showed her a way out. Was it a fluke -- or the future?
By Tom Shroder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 25, 2007; Page W12
THE BED IS TILTING!
Or the couch, or whatever. A futon. Slanted.
She hadn't noticed it before, but now she can't stop noticing. Like the princess and the pea.
By objective measure, the tilt is negligible, a fraction of an inch, but she can't be fooled by appearances, not with the sleep mask on. In her inner darkness, the slight tilt magnifies, and suddenly she feels as if she might slide off, and that idea makes her giggle.
"I feel really, really weird," she says. "Crooked!"
Donna Kilgore laughs, a high-pitched sound that contains both thrill and anxiety. That she feels anything at all, anything other than the weighty, oppressive numbness that has filled her for 11 years, is enough in itself to make her giddy.
But there is something more at work inside her, something growing from the little white capsule she swallowed just minutes ago. She's subject No. 1 in a historic experiment, the first U.S. government-sanctioned research in two decades into the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat psychiatric disorders. This 2004 session in the office of a Charleston, S.C., psychiatrist is being recorded on audiocassettes, which Donna will later hand to a journalist.
The tape reveals her reaction as she listens to the gentle piano music playing in her headphones. Behind her eyelids, movies begin to unreel. She tries to say what she sees: Cars careening down the wrong side of the road. Vivid images of her oldest daughter, then all three of her children. She's overcome with an all-consuming love, a love she thought she'd lost forever.
"Now I feel all warm and fuzzy," she announces. "I'm not nervous anymore."
"What level of distress do you feel right now?" a deeply mellow voice beside her asks.
Donna answers with a giggle. "I don't think I got the placebo," she says.
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Post-traumatic stress disorder had destroyed Donna Kilgore's life. Then experimental therapy with MDMA, a psychedelic drug better known as ecstasy, showed her a way out. Was it a fluke -- or the future?
By Tom Shroder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 25, 2007; Page W12
THE BED IS TILTING!
Or the couch, or whatever. A futon. Slanted.
She hadn't noticed it before, but now she can't stop noticing. Like the princess and the pea.
By objective measure, the tilt is negligible, a fraction of an inch, but she can't be fooled by appearances, not with the sleep mask on. In her inner darkness, the slight tilt magnifies, and suddenly she feels as if she might slide off, and that idea makes her giggle.
"I feel really, really weird," she says. "Crooked!"
Donna Kilgore laughs, a high-pitched sound that contains both thrill and anxiety. That she feels anything at all, anything other than the weighty, oppressive numbness that has filled her for 11 years, is enough in itself to make her giddy.
But there is something more at work inside her, something growing from the little white capsule she swallowed just minutes ago. She's subject No. 1 in a historic experiment, the first U.S. government-sanctioned research in two decades into the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat psychiatric disorders. This 2004 session in the office of a Charleston, S.C., psychiatrist is being recorded on audiocassettes, which Donna will later hand to a journalist.
The tape reveals her reaction as she listens to the gentle piano music playing in her headphones. Behind her eyelids, movies begin to unreel. She tries to say what she sees: Cars careening down the wrong side of the road. Vivid images of her oldest daughter, then all three of her children. She's overcome with an all-consuming love, a love she thought she'd lost forever.
"Now I feel all warm and fuzzy," she announces. "I'm not nervous anymore."
"What level of distress do you feel right now?" a deeply mellow voice beside her asks.
Donna answers with a giggle. "I don't think I got the placebo," she says.
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