ptsd

This is really disturbing. ABC News is reporting that the government is testing drugs with possible violent and suicidal side effects on veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD. Worse, it failed to notify those veterans of these possible side effects:

Mentally distressed veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are being recruited for government tests on pharmaceutical drugs linked to suicide and other violent side effects, an investigation by ABC News and The Washington Times has found.

The report will air on Good Morning America and will also appear in The Washington Times on Tuesday. (click here to read the Washington Times coverage of "Disposable Heroes")

In one of the human experiments, involving the anti-smoking drug Chantix, Veterans Administration doctors waited more than three months before warning veterans about the possible serious side effects, including suicide and neuropsychiatric behavior.

"Lab rat, guinea pig, disposable hero," said former US Army sniper James Elliott in describing how he felt he was betrayed by the Veterans Administration.

Elliott, 38, of suburban Washington, D.C., was recruited, at $30 a month, for the Chantix anti-smoking study three years after being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He served a 15-month tour of duty in Iraq from 2003-2004.

Months after he began taking the drug, Elliott suffered a mental breakdown, experiencing a relapse of Iraq combat nightmares he blames on Chantix.

"They never told me that I was going to be suicidal, that I would cease sleeping. They never told me anything except this will help me quit smoking," Elliott told ABC News and The Washington Times.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

• PBS did a huge segment on the youth vote with Heather Smith of Rock the Vote, Sujatha Jahagirdar of PIRG, and three students each supporting one of the remaining candidates. For my money, Sujatha had the best line in the piece:
  
  But the real story here is that young people have been turning out for many election cycles. In fact, in 2004, youth turnout increased by more than 11 percent, which was almost triple the increase we saw in the general population.

  So what we hope we see this election cycle is the permanent death of the notion that young people don't vote and young people don't matter. - PBS

• The National Campus Voter Registration Project has launched Your Vote, Your Voice, a project to help students register their peers on campus. - Chronicle of Higher Education
• Scotty McClellan's new book is the talk of the town and everyone has blogged it today. For my money, Glenn Greenwald has the best take in this post which skewers the media reaction. - Salon
• All three remaining candidates have joined forces to release a (toothless) statement about Darfur. - TPM Election Central
• Clinton backers plan to protest at the game-deciding Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting this Saturday. - Washington Post
• With less than one week to go, Obama appears to be "banking" super delegates for a big announcement. - Political Wire
• Whatever happened to the Jena 6? - AlterNet
• The VA continues to downplay the seriousness of PTSD. - Vet Voice
• Declare Yourself has released a book in which celebrities discuss why they will vote. Not too sure how I feel about this. Seems a little silly and superficial, but if it sells copies and convinces people to go to the polls then yay on them. - Declare Yourself
• The latest craze at Oberlin College? Competitive sustainable living. - New York Times
• GRITtv interviews a soldier who was stop-lossed. - FireDogLake

This is a disgrace. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and VoteVets.org have discovered that the VA is instructing its staff to avoid diagnosing soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD:

Both CREW and VoteVets have issued spot-on statements on the matter:

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today:

It is outrageous that the VA is calling on its employees to deliberately misdiagnose returning veterans in an effort to cut costs. Those who have risked their lives serving our country deserve far better. First and foremost, they have a right to expect that they receive diagnoses and treatment based on their symptoms and not on the VA’s budget. The VA should immediately reverse this and any other similar directives.

Jon Soltz, an Iraq War Veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org, added:

This is an issue I take personally. I know of many people who received a diagnosis of ‘Adjustment Disorder,’ who strongly felt they had PTSD, many of whom confirmed that suspicion with an independent diagnosis. Many veterans believe that the government just doesn’t want to pay out the disability that comes along with a PTSD diagnosis, and this revelation will not allay their concerns. It is crucial that we quickly get to the bottom of this, and ensure that misdiagnosing veterans is not part of some cost-cutting policy.

According to a study by the RAND corporation, approximately 300,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan display symptoms of PTSD, or nearly 20% of veterans. PTSD is highly stigmatized within the military (in which is is viewed as a sign of weakness). Soldiers are encouraged to "tough it out" rather than seek proper car. That's why only half of those 300,000 veterans have ever sought treatment.

This move by the VA makes worse and already bad situation in which soldiers are not receiving the proper care from an injury that is as serious as any physical wound. Earlier this year Senators Clinton and Obama met with young veterans to discuss their issues, and PTSD came up a number of times. Here's a chance for them to show those veterans their support.

If it isn't enough that the majority of the 3,889 soldiers (as of 1am CDT 12/14/07) that are now dead from this war are under 30 - now apparently many who have survived the war are so plagued with mental illness that they are committing suicide.

Today I saw a short piece on CNN with heartbreaking parents talking about cooking Thanksgiving Dinner while unknowingly their son was bleeding to death from a self inflicted gunshot wound.

"The number of soldiers who committed suicide increased 15 percent from 2005 to 2006, according to an Army report... The numbers have not previously been released, despite repeated CNN requests for data covering the past seven months."

Reasons given by the Army in 2006

"were failed relationships, legal and financial problems and "occupational/operational" issues. The "typical profile" of a soldier who commits suicide is a member of an infantry unit who kills himself with a firearm.

So when I heard this - knowing that a majority of soldiers tend to be young I wanted to check demographic data.

70% of those who attempted suicide are under 25. Add to that the 16% who are 25-30 and you have 86% of our Millennial soldiers that are attempting suicide. Those who actually succeed 67% are 18-30.

According to Psyciatric News

"The U.S. Army announced in August that 99 soldiers committed suicide in 2006. That translates to a rate of 17.3 per 100,000. There were 948 soldiers who attempted suicide."

Another story I heard a few weeks ago on NPR was about soldiers who are being dishonorably discharged for behavioral occurrence. Often times soldiers who have PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) are discharged dishonorably for poor behavior, going AWOL, or substance abuse while on the job.

"Soldier Tyler Jennings says that when he came home from Iraq last year, he felt so depressed and desperate that he decided to kill himself. Late one night in the middle of May, his wife was out of town, and he felt more scared than he'd felt in gunfights in Iraq. Jennings says he opened the window, tied a noose around his neck and started drinking vodka, "trying to get drunk enough to either slip or just make that decision. . . . Jennings says that when the sergeants who ran his platoon found out he was having a breakdown and taking drugs, they started to haze him. He decided to attempt suicide when they said that they would eject him from the Army."

The piece goes on to say that a GAO study found that 80% of soldiers who exhibited potential signs of PTSD were not referred for mental health follow ups. And even if they do, the unit is so overwhelmed that they don't get the help they need.

It then says that a major problem is when their superiors or friends find out that they have emotional problems that they treat them like "pariahs" saying "they don't belong in the Army."

"Jennings called a supervisor at Ft. Carson to say that he had almost killed himself, so he was going to skip formation to check into a psychiatric ward. The Defense Department's clinical guidelines say that when a soldier has been planning suicide, one of the main ways to help is to put him in the hospital. Instead, officers sent a team of soldiers to his house to put him in jail, saying that Jennings was AWOL for missing work."

And when they can't intimidate them out of their emotional distress, they just fire them.

"Richard Travis, formerly the Army's senior prosecutor at Ft. Carson, is now in private practice. He says that the Army has to pay special mental-health benefits to soldiers discharged due to PTSD. But soldiers discharged for breaking the rules receive fewer or even no benefits, he says.

Alex Orum's medical records showed that he had PTSD, but his officers expelled him from the Army earlier this year for "patterns of misconduct," repeatedly citing him on disciplinary grounds. In Orum's case, he was cited for such infractions as showing up late to formation, coming to work unwashed, mishandling his personal finances and lying to supervisors — behaviors which psychiatrists say are consistent with PTSD."

It's hard to comment on this. The facts clearly speak for themselves. I spent many of my years in college being pissed that people I know were fighting a war I knew was stupid and wrong.

Thomas PM Barnett says it well in his analysis of what we did wrong in Iraq and how we could have done it better:

"I ask you, who joins the military to do things other than war? Actually, most of them. Jessica Lynch never planned on shooting back.

Now, a chunk of them are dead or they want to be. I know it isn't as many people as there were in Vietnam or in WW2 or WW1, but it doesn't diminish the fact that these are my people. My friends and yours, our sisters and brothers, and our college mates. Is this really how we want to treat them?

No wonder they are having hard time with recruitment.