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Every little thing helps in the Pentagon’s and VA’s war on PTSD, depression and suicide. The latest: the Positive Activity Jackpot app for your Android smartphone (apparently folks with iPhones don’t need such help). It immerses mentally-ailing troops or vets in “pleasant event scheduling” by marrying behavioral therapy to their GPS location. Its goal: guide [...]
The recently-issued policy on screening and treating PTSD from the Army’s Office of the Surgeon General (OTSG) is dense, specific and should be helpful in advancing the field of post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis and treatment. Last week, I posted on the change in the criteria for diagnosing PTSD. Now we’ll examine a central focus of the [...]
Americans will celebrate Memorial Day next month, and honor those who’ve died while serving to protect the rest of us. But some concerned members of Congress are going to skip their hometown barbeques so they can hit the road: they’ll be warning of a looming half-trillion-dollar cut in defense spending over the next decade (atop [...]
I visited Joint Base Lewis-McCord in Washington state last week, to attend the retirement of a good friend of mine, another Army psychiatrist who has served for many years. I have blogged before about my dismay at the allegations swirling around the post’s Madigan Army Medical Center. But this was my first time back to [...]
Remember the controversy over the Pentagon’s armor-killing depleted-uranium rounds that were widely used for the first time in 1991’s Gulf War? Many troops blamed them for the various ills that came to be known as Gulf War syndrome. The Pentagon spent a lot of time saying there was no known link. “The available evidence,” the [...]
There’s a head-turning article in the latest edition of the Journal of Family Issues (admittedly something rarely found on Battleland’s nightstand) about how well military marriages are faring after 10 years of war. After all the stories about PTSD, TBI, depression and suicide, it’s fair to wonder how the average American military wife-and-husband are getting [...]
– Air Force General William Shelton, head of U.S. Space Command, on why he has ordered the 1,800 airmen in Space Command to stop wearing flight suits, flight jackets and leather “bomber” jackets. Savings: $372 per airman annually, or $670,000 per year.
This chart comes from a Government Accountability Office report released Thursday. It’s funny how some Pentagon costs seemed to have turned on their afterburners in the wake of 9/11.
A career website has just issued a ranking of 200 jobs from best to worst. They range from software engineer (#1, the best) to lumberjack (#200, the worst). Their placement is purportedly based on each job’s environment, physical demands, income, stress and future prospects (reporter: #196. That high?). Here are the three military-related careers listed [...]
