The War after The War
The Long Island Press has published an article worth taking a hard look at. It deals with the mental health issues of our soldiers coming back from Operation Iraqi Freedom and how the cash-strapped Veterans Administration could possibly help them. I'm posting the first half of the story because I find it especially moving. You can read the rest at Long Island Press Cover Story.
The War after The War
Thousands of soldiers are returning from Iraq with serious psychological problems. Can a cash-strapped VA help them before it's too late?
By Dan Frosch with Lauren Wolfe
The first time Kristen Peterson's husband hit her, she was asleep in their bed.
She awakened a split second after Josh Peterson's fist smashed into her face, and ran out terrified and crying to wipe the blood spurting from her nose.
When she looked into the bedroom, he was punching at the air, muttering that she was coming after him and he was going to kill her. His eyes were closed. He was still asleep.
For six months last year, he had helped build an oil pipeline across Iraq as a specialist in the Army's 110th Quartermaster Company. On the same highway where Pvt. Jessica Lynch was ambushed, he saw Iraqi soldiers, dead and rotting, hanging out of their tanks. One time Peterson's truck broke down and he was surrounded by a group of Iraqi children, some throwing rocks, others toting AK-47s.
"I kept thinking, 'God, I can't handle this,'" the 23-year-old says with a hollow laugh.
Since Peterson came home, those memories and others he won't reveal have turned him into a man Kristen often doesn't recognize—a man who either ignores her and their 2-year-old daughter or lashes out in anger, a man whose awful dreams make him hit his wife.
Similar experiences are troubling thousands of Operation Iraqi Freedom soldiers returning home. Dr. Ganesan Krishnamoorthy, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at the Northport VA Medical Center, has personally treated two veterans of the Iraq war who came home to LI in the past six months.
The stress of daily warfare leaves them with a kind of jumpiness and mistrust, he says. "They can be killed every minute of the day," Krishnamoorthy explains. "As a result, their senses are greatly heightened. They don't sleep as well—maybe they sleep with one eye open. They jump at loud sounds like a door slamming. In a new place, they wonder who they can trust."
A December 2003 Army study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that 16 percent of soldiers in Iraq were suffering from PTSD, a psychologically debilitating condition characterized by intense nightmares, paranoia and anxiety.
But that study is already out of date. After months of fighting a bloody insurgency, many military and mental health experts predict the PTSD rate will run nearly twice what that study found, approximating the same level suffered by Vietnam veterans.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which chronically underfunded mental health programs for years before the Iraq war, has quietly conceded that it has neither the staff nor the money to treat everyone. Despite vast improvements, recent VA reports reveal deficiencies in its mental health services, projecting a $1.65 billion shortfall in those services by 2007.
The emerging scenario is that of a generation of veterans whose psyches are in tatters as an exhausted health care system holds its breath.
The rest of the story: http://www.longislandpress.com/v03/i04050127/coverstory_01.asp
The War after The War
Thousands of soldiers are returning from Iraq with serious psychological problems. Can a cash-strapped VA help them before it's too late?
By Dan Frosch with Lauren Wolfe
The first time Kristen Peterson's husband hit her, she was asleep in their bed.
She awakened a split second after Josh Peterson's fist smashed into her face, and ran out terrified and crying to wipe the blood spurting from her nose.
When she looked into the bedroom, he was punching at the air, muttering that she was coming after him and he was going to kill her. His eyes were closed. He was still asleep.
For six months last year, he had helped build an oil pipeline across Iraq as a specialist in the Army's 110th Quartermaster Company. On the same highway where Pvt. Jessica Lynch was ambushed, he saw Iraqi soldiers, dead and rotting, hanging out of their tanks. One time Peterson's truck broke down and he was surrounded by a group of Iraqi children, some throwing rocks, others toting AK-47s.
"I kept thinking, 'God, I can't handle this,'" the 23-year-old says with a hollow laugh.
Since Peterson came home, those memories and others he won't reveal have turned him into a man Kristen often doesn't recognize—a man who either ignores her and their 2-year-old daughter or lashes out in anger, a man whose awful dreams make him hit his wife.
Similar experiences are troubling thousands of Operation Iraqi Freedom soldiers returning home. Dr. Ganesan Krishnamoorthy, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at the Northport VA Medical Center, has personally treated two veterans of the Iraq war who came home to LI in the past six months.
The stress of daily warfare leaves them with a kind of jumpiness and mistrust, he says. "They can be killed every minute of the day," Krishnamoorthy explains. "As a result, their senses are greatly heightened. They don't sleep as well—maybe they sleep with one eye open. They jump at loud sounds like a door slamming. In a new place, they wonder who they can trust."
A December 2003 Army study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that 16 percent of soldiers in Iraq were suffering from PTSD, a psychologically debilitating condition characterized by intense nightmares, paranoia and anxiety.
But that study is already out of date. After months of fighting a bloody insurgency, many military and mental health experts predict the PTSD rate will run nearly twice what that study found, approximating the same level suffered by Vietnam veterans.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which chronically underfunded mental health programs for years before the Iraq war, has quietly conceded that it has neither the staff nor the money to treat everyone. Despite vast improvements, recent VA reports reveal deficiencies in its mental health services, projecting a $1.65 billion shortfall in those services by 2007.
The emerging scenario is that of a generation of veterans whose psyches are in tatters as an exhausted health care system holds its breath.
The rest of the story: http://www.longislandpress.com/v03/i04050127/coverstory_01.asp
posted by Kass at 10:20 PM
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