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I want to make a couple quick comments on the furor over Major General Dana Pittard’s blog post that soldiers who kill themselves are being selfish, and his exhortation that those thinking of suicide should just buck up and face their problems like an adult. “Suicide is an absolutely selfish act,” he wrote to his official [...]
There’s a continuing tension over whether mental disorders are “organic” or “psychological”. The first is easier to define — a brain injury caused by an insult, such as a bullet wound, blow to the head or bomb blast. “Psychological” is usually chalked up to bad parenting. Two new debates raise this issue again. One is [...]
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 [...]
Marine General John Allen, commander of forces in Afghanistan, is planning for the end – the withdrawal of U.S. forces, expecting to leave behind a small training force, but saddling the U.S. taxpayers with at least $2 billion a year to pay for the Afghan security force. Better deal than we have now, at roughly [...]
Two separate events Wednesday put into sharp focus what is happening to the young Americans the nation has been sending off to war for more than a decade: – At 2 p.m., scientists at Boston University and the Boston VA announced they have found chronic traumatic encephalopathy – brain damage like that suffered by boxers [...]
Four of the top five non-combat medical conditions sending troops to the hospital in 2011 were mental ailments, the Pentagon reports: “Substance abuse, mood, anxiety, and adjustment disorders accounted for 622 person-years of lost duty due to hospitalization, convalescence, and limited duty dispositions,” the summary of military hospitalizations concluded. “Mental disorders accounted for more hospital [...]
I love all of the current dialogue between the American Psychiatric Association and the military. For years, they were at loggerheads, principally about the policy of not allowing gays to openly serve in the armed forces. Military psychiatrists could wear their uniform at APA events, but were often singled out for criticism over the policy. [...]
I am encouraged recently to see that community-based, civilian clinicians want to be prepared to meet the mental health needs of returning veterans and their families. One great example is the extraordinary response to a free on-line educational series From the War Zone to the Home Front: Supporting the Mental Health Needs of Veterans and [...]
This week, the American Psychiatric Association is meeting in Philadelphia. Among the presentations in the “military track”—a spate of meetings directed towards practitioners focused on military or war related psychology and psychiatry—the top listed presentation is titled “Combat Related PTSD: Injury or Disorder?” Based on conversations I’ve had in the past couple weeks with psychiatrists [...]
Next week is the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Philadelphia, the largest yearly gathering of its kind. It’s exciting because of the prominence military matters are going to get. Last year there were perhaps 15 military-related sessions at the meeting in Hawaii. This year, there’s going to be twice as many dedicated to military [...]
