Houston prepares for flood of PTSD and TBI veterans

March 30, 2008, 11:30PM
A healthier homecoming
Houston needs to prepare for flood of veterans with mental and brain disabilities


Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle


The converted Holiday Inn at 4640 Main Street is packed, but fulfilling its purpose. The nonprofit facility now houses 280 veterans with head injuries, mental illness or other combat-related wounds.

The only hitch: Most are Vietnam veterans. Houston so far has barely glimpsed the psychological harm suffered by thousands of soldiers soon to come home from Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's a certainty, though, that they will need services far beyond what Houston currently can give.

"We're basically busting at the seams, to tell you the truth, " said Tom Mitchell, director of the Main Street facility. "And it may be three, or four, or five years before (new) veterans start hitting the streets" because post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injuries unglued their lives.

In some ways, these newer veterans will benefit from lessons of the Vietnam War and, more recently, scandalous mistreatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Doctors today are more familiar with PTSD. Its symptoms include anxiety, insomnia, substance abuse and depression. And the Walter Reed revelations goaded Congress into studying veterans' physical and psychological needs and better coordinating the Veterans Administration and Defense Department so wounded veterans can get treatment more easily.

Even so, both national and local mental health experts say programs aren't in place to handle the flood of homecoming soldiers who will be suffering PTSD and traumatic brain injury. It's estimated that 17 percent to 30 percent of soldiers will come home with PTSD alone.

Harris County, with its gross deficit in mental health care services for civilians, could be particularly hard hit. Already, about 70 percent of Houston's 10,000 homeless people suffer serious mental illness. Some 30 percent of those homeless are veterans, mostly from Vietnam.

The returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan could have even more severe problems. The new phenomenon of repeated, prolonged combat — two, three, even four tours of duty — intensifies traumatic stress disorders.

Houston will see a large number of these patients. One in 11 soldiers who are wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is a Texan. And 25 percent of the state population is from the Houston-Galveston area.
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Phishing scam turns out to be an inside Army job

Phishing scam turns out to be an inside job

By Karen Jowers - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Apr 1, 2008 13:31:21 EDT

An Army “phishing” test backfired the day before April Fool’s Day after an Army command was discovered phishing amongst its own.

The Army Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation Command issued a press release at 4:12 p.m. Monday warning about a phishing e-mail scam.

The e-mail, which sported the Army’s official MWR logo, appeared to be an attempt to obtain personal information from soldiers by offering promises of free or discounted tickets to theme parks and attractions.

The press release said the Family and MWR Command was trying to find the owners of the Web site and the host of the domain.

Less than an hour later, the command issued another statement saying the phishers had been found — the Army’s own Network Enterprise Technology Command.

That command had notified MWR officials that it had been conducting a test of how soldiers respond to phishing scams — without letting anyone in the MWR command know about it.

Army MWR officials sent out a retraction 54 minutes after their phishing warning went out, saying they were “furious” that such a test had been conducted, using the MWR logo, without their knowledge or consent, and apologizing “for any inconvenience this might have caused.”

The phishing scam e-mail listed a Web link with an online registration form asking for a name, e-mail address, phone, city, state and ZIP code. The e-mail apparently went out across the service to soldiers’ Army e-mail accounts and to MWR professionals.

“I don’t think they were doing anything malicious,” said Laurie Pugh, spokeswoman for the Army Family and MWR Command. “They were just testing the system to protect our soldiers. We wish we had known in advance. But we know our system worked. We got the word out quickly.”
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Richard Hernandez, Marine, Vietnam Vet just wanted to sleep

Vietnam vet looks back to battlefields

BY JAMES GILBERT
SUN STAFF WRITER



Some veterans who served in Vietnam wanted to put the war behind them as soon as they returned home from the fighting.

That's what Foothills resident Richard Hernandez, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, said he did for nearly four decades.

But in the course of getting records to document his claim for greater disability benefits, he decided he wanted to know more about how his actions on the battlefield fit into the bigger picture of that war.

"I wanted to know what all I did while I was there. It was important to me," Hernandez said of the armed conflict he experienced. "It was a lot of muscle, sweat and blood. But you got used to it after awhile."

Hernandez, 59, grew up in Gonzalez, Calif., and joined the U.S. Marine Corps on March 6, 1968, at the age of 18. He did so, he said, so he could be more like his older brother, who had already enlisted and was wounded while serving in Vietnam.
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He went to the VA so that he could sleep. That's all he wanted. Imagine a lifetime of service, deaing with PTSD and that's all he wanted!

Wales:PTSD, TBI, AWOL trooper charged and discharged

Wales
Trooper Craig diagnosed with post-traumatic strees
Mar 31 2008 by Hywel Trewyn, Daily Post

TROOPER Craig Roberts was already suffering from the stresses of war before the bomb exploded.

He had first gone to Iraq with the First Queen’s Dragoon Guards in April 2006.

In September of that year, after serving five months, he went home on leave to Porthmadog.

He became distressed and begged his mum to help him – saying he did not want to go back.

Wendy called Army welfare officers who promised Craig would be assessed in the battalion’s base in Germany. In fact, he was flown back to Iraq.

A fortnight later, Craig was serving as a gunner on an armoured vehicle when the roadside bomb went off.

After treatment at a Birmingham hospital, Craig was advised to go to Hedley Court, London, which specialises in head injuries, but was never referred there by his regiment.

Instead he returned to Porthmadog where he developed behavioural problems and his heavy drinking landed him in trouble with the police.

He smashed up his mum’s home, including every photograph of himself in Iraq, and was verbally abusive towards his family.

Wendy said: “He couldn’t cope with what he’d gone through. He was virtually dumped in Porthmadog by the Army and didn’t get the help he needed.”

After drinking continuously for days Craig ended up owing over £1,000 in fines mainly for being drunk and disorderly.

Last year, while on leave, a local doctor who had cared for Craig after his accident in Iraq wrote him a sick note covering him until March 5 which was faxed through to his regiment but the Army refused to recognise it.

Craig was arrested for being Awol on March 3, 2007 and was escorted on to a plane at Manchester airport.

In Germany Craig had his Awol hearing and was sentenced to eight days jail and an administrative discharge.

The day after he had an appointment regarding his head injuries and his right for compensation.

Last year an Ysbyty Gwynedd psychiatrist found Craig had post traumatic stress disorder.
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Does any nation get this right? Is any nation able to learn what justice is when it comes to those who serve their nation? They take a human, send them into the abnormal traumatic world of combat and then expect them to come away the same way they went in. Shame! Shame on them and shame on all the nations allowing this kind of treatment to those who serve in the military. For heaven's sake, they have history books a lot older than the US does. Do they ever read them? Do they ever read the stories of wars and what it did to the people who fought them?

War Veterans face ongoing battle with PTSD

Anthony Torres, 26, a Marine who served tours of duty in Iraq and in Africa, says coming home was more difficult than he expected.

Appearing weak or ill is an image Iraq veteran Rick Brannan combats every day. Brannan, 55, was deployed with a Navy customs team to Operation Iraqi Freedom in June of 2005. There he provided armed escorts to troops headed home. Brannan also was assigned the task of inspecting coffins for contraband, a memory that still grieves him.

SPECIAL REPORT: The front lines shift ... Military veterans face varying battles
Alysa Landry The Daily Times
Article Launched: 03/31/2008 12:00:00 AM MDT
Editor's note: Today's story is the second of a three-part series that began Sunday and ends Tuesday.

FARMINGTON — Anthony Torres was looking forward to life as a civilian. The 26-year-old Marine spent seven months atop a Humvee manning an anti-tank missile in wartorn Iraq, and he was anxious to be home.

When he returned, however, he found a life so chaotic it rivaled his experiences overseas. Torres served in a security convoy during the 2004 U.S. assault on Fallujah, and he relives some of that terror every day.

A smell, a sound or a simple argument can send Torres back to Iraq.

"During my third week of the assault, the engineers assigned to clean up all the dead people hadn't come through yet," he said. "I remember that smell. It's like barbecuing with diesel."

A similar odor permeates the local oil fields, Torres said, and a whiff of that rewinds the clock.

"It sets me off and brings back memories," he said. "I have to logically figure out what's causing the smell and bring myself back to reality.



Coming Tuesday: The search for solutions.
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PTSD: Symptoms are varied, complex
By Alysa Landry The Daily Times
Article Launched: 04/01/2008 12:00:00 AM MDT


Flashbacks, nightmares and exaggerated startle responses all are typical symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, but the condition is more complex.
Seventeen symptoms are used to diagnose the disorder, and a person must meet the minimum criteria for a positive diagnosis. The following are guidelines to understand the disorder. Only a trained psychologist can make a diagnosis.

Source: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The person must have been exposed to a traumatic event in which both of the following were present:


Actual or threatened death, serious injury, or threat to physical integrity.

Response to the event involved intense fear, helplessness or horror.
The traumatic event is re-experienced persistently in at least one of the following ways:


Recurrent and intrusive thoughts about the event.

Recurrent distressing dreams of the event.

Flashbacks or hallucinations.

Intense distress at exposure to triggers that symbolize the event.


Physiological reactivity to triggers, such as pounding heart or sweaty palms.

The person must persistently avoid stimuli associated with trauma in at least three of the following ways:


Avoiding thoughts, feelings or conversations about the event.

Avoiding activities, people or places that remind a person about the event.

Inability to recall an important aspect of the event.

Diminished interest or participation in significant activities.

Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others.

Restricted range of emotions.

Sense of foreshortened future, such as loss of expectation of having a career, marriage, children or normal life span.

The person must experience persistent symptoms of arousal in at least two of the following ways:


Difficulty falling or staying asleep.

Irritability or outbursts of anger.

Difficulty concentrating.

Hyper-vigilance.

Exaggerated startle response.

Symptoms must last for at least one month.


Disturbance causes significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning.
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