How to get PTSD. Twice. Worse.

I just read disturbing comments by a highly respected University of California doc Karen Seal [who screens and treats returning veterans from Iraq or Afghanistan at San Francisco’s famous Ft. Miley Veterans Administration Hospital, one of our premier VA Research Hospitals] about the redeployment of young soldiers treated for PTSD and other neurological and psychatric problems back to Mid-East war zones [http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,136020,00.html]. Effective last December, service members with a “psychiatric disorder in remission, or whose residual symptoms do not impair duty performance” may be sent back to Iraq or Afghanistan. The redeployment decision will be made by their military commanders. Dr. Seal stated flatly that patients under her direct care had been deployed back to the war zone despite serious mental health conditions. You can believe her because she and her colleagues have shown that these problems are not exactly a rare outcome for service men and women serving in these theaters of action. Of 100,000 returning vets examined in the studies of Dr. Seal and her VA Hospital colleagues to date, more than 30,000 had a SERIOUS mental health problem. (Lots more, as we’ve pointed out earlier, are merely cognitively impaired.) If you do a little math on the attrition rates in miltary units going from deployment to deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan, it reveals that many thousands of those redeployed soldiers — including very man...
Source: On the Brain by Dr. Michael Merzenich, Ph.D. - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Brain Fitness Brain Trauma, Injury BrainHQ Cognitive impairments Posit Science Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et alia Source Type: blogs