In order to participate in the GunBroker Member forums, you must be logged in with your GunBroker.com account. Click the sign-in button at the top right of the forums page to get connected.
Options
War On Terror Could Prolong Stress Disorders
Night Stalker
Member Posts: 11,967
Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader
June 28, 2005
War On Terror Could Prolong Stress Disorders
By Associated Press
FORT KNOX - A psychologist at Fort Knox says the war on terrorism is ripe for prolonging post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers.
"When they come back, they don't feel safe here, either," said Col. Susan Rogers, a psychologist who runs the behavioral health clinic at Fort Knox's hospital. "That's one of the prime symptoms, and they can be triggered by anything from a car going by to thunder and lightning storms."
Veterans returning from Iraq have increased the amount of such cases at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell and at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals in Louisville and Lexington, according to doctors and psychologists. Officials at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell would not disclose exact numbers.
The post-traumatic stress disorder clinic for the Louisville Veterans Affairs Medical Center has been expanded in the past year to accommodate the influx, and a 20-bed inpatient facility for veterans with the disorder opened earlier this year at the VA hospital in Lexington.
At Lexington's VA hospital, 316 veterans with the disorder made 4,550 visits to the outpatient clinic last year, up from 264 veterans who made 3,920 visits in 2002, the year before the war began, said spokeswoman Desti Stimes.
Tens of thousands of the roughly 525,000 soldiers the Pentagon says have served in Iraq or Afghanistan are expected to face symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a study of 1,709 soldiers and Marines who returned from the wars last year.
The study, reported last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that 18 percent of the soldiers and 20 percent of the Marines met the broad criteria for the disorder. The study was conducted three to four months after the troops returned from Iraq.
About 13 percent of the soldiers and 12 percent of the Marines reported that the disorder had substantially interfered with their daily lives. Signs of other mental problems, such as anxiety and major depression, were present as well, the study said.
Samantha Hughes says her husband, Army Capt. K.C. Hughes, has violent nightmares about an ambush in Iraq that killed two of his men and put a bullet in his back.
K.C. Hughes said Samantha, 25, told him that he would push her aside when she tried to wake him.
"That's the primary reason I went to get help. I didn't want to hurt my wife," said Hughes, 26, a West Point graduate.
Hughes credits Army doctors and the chance to talk openly about the May 2003 ambush for making his nightmares less frequent.
Hughes spent about five months stateside recovering from his injuries, but was back with his unit in Iraq by November 2003.
This month, he took command of his first company-sized unit at Fort Knox. He said that seeking help has been critical to getting his life back, though he expects never to be entirely free of the disorder.
NSDQ!
www.nightstalkers.com
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." -- John Stewart Mill
June 28, 2005
War On Terror Could Prolong Stress Disorders
By Associated Press
FORT KNOX - A psychologist at Fort Knox says the war on terrorism is ripe for prolonging post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers.
"When they come back, they don't feel safe here, either," said Col. Susan Rogers, a psychologist who runs the behavioral health clinic at Fort Knox's hospital. "That's one of the prime symptoms, and they can be triggered by anything from a car going by to thunder and lightning storms."
Veterans returning from Iraq have increased the amount of such cases at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell and at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals in Louisville and Lexington, according to doctors and psychologists. Officials at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell would not disclose exact numbers.
The post-traumatic stress disorder clinic for the Louisville Veterans Affairs Medical Center has been expanded in the past year to accommodate the influx, and a 20-bed inpatient facility for veterans with the disorder opened earlier this year at the VA hospital in Lexington.
At Lexington's VA hospital, 316 veterans with the disorder made 4,550 visits to the outpatient clinic last year, up from 264 veterans who made 3,920 visits in 2002, the year before the war began, said spokeswoman Desti Stimes.
Tens of thousands of the roughly 525,000 soldiers the Pentagon says have served in Iraq or Afghanistan are expected to face symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a study of 1,709 soldiers and Marines who returned from the wars last year.
The study, reported last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that 18 percent of the soldiers and 20 percent of the Marines met the broad criteria for the disorder. The study was conducted three to four months after the troops returned from Iraq.
About 13 percent of the soldiers and 12 percent of the Marines reported that the disorder had substantially interfered with their daily lives. Signs of other mental problems, such as anxiety and major depression, were present as well, the study said.
Samantha Hughes says her husband, Army Capt. K.C. Hughes, has violent nightmares about an ambush in Iraq that killed two of his men and put a bullet in his back.
K.C. Hughes said Samantha, 25, told him that he would push her aside when she tried to wake him.
"That's the primary reason I went to get help. I didn't want to hurt my wife," said Hughes, 26, a West Point graduate.
Hughes credits Army doctors and the chance to talk openly about the May 2003 ambush for making his nightmares less frequent.
Hughes spent about five months stateside recovering from his injuries, but was back with his unit in Iraq by November 2003.
This month, he took command of his first company-sized unit at Fort Knox. He said that seeking help has been critical to getting his life back, though he expects never to be entirely free of the disorder.
NSDQ!
www.nightstalkers.com
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." -- John Stewart Mill
Comments
I mean, who here thinks that once Iraq is over, for good or ill, that any enemy we face won't be using IEDs? Who here thinks that hostage-taking will cease forever with the fighting in Baghdad? With the conclusion of the war in Iraq, do we honestly believe the phenomena of the drive-by shooting, car bomb, and sniper will magically disappear?
Somehow, I don't think so. And apparently neither do the folks returning from Iraq.
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." Winston Churchill
volenti non fit injuria
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." Winston Churchill
volenti non fit injuria
Declaring war on terrorism is a little like shooting the Gulf of Mexico with a bazooka because you hate water pollution.
You go after the root causes of it to minimize both its occurence and impact.
What you DO NOT do is create a mess for yourself, half-@$$ the clean-up effort, and provide training for the bad guy. Every day we sit around in Iraq, we provide our enemies the world round with more data on how to kill our men and women, how to push our nation's endurance to its limits, and how to increase the costs to us while minimizing effort expended.
Latest estimate on the Iraqi insurgency - 16,000.
Current U.S. troop strength: 135,000+.
By those numbers we have told the world that even outnumbering the enemy over 8 to 1, we still cannot bring order and stability to a territory the size of California.
We are not waging a war on terror in Iraq. We are having our bluff called.
Everyone is somebody's "weirdo".
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." Winston Churchill
volenti non fit injuria
I know how your brother feels. Whether or not he's talking about Afghanistan, it's an apt way to feel about out latest "forgotten war."