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Trash can be deadly. You can get a hint of that from the contract solicitation issued Tuesday by the Defense Logistics Agency’s European disposition office seeking “hazardous waste services in southwest Asia.” Lord knows, after a decade of war the U.S. military needs help getting rid of these deadly leftovers. The Pentagon made clear that [...]
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 [...]
Whenever federal bureaucrats running the nation’s parks get antsy that their purse is likely to shrink, they roll out something long known as the “Washington Monument strategy.” That’s the tried-and-true technique of warning the public that if money isn’t forthcoming, one of the first budget cuts will force the shutting down of the popular obelisk [...]
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 [...]
President Obama presented the Medal of Honor Wednesday to Rose Sabo-Brown, widow of Specialist Leslie H. Sabo, Jr., U.S. Army, in the East Room of the White House. Sabo earned the decoration posthumously for his heroic actions in combat on May 10, 1970, while serving in eastern Cambodia in an expanded Vietnam war. That’s 42 [...]
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 am not a veteran and I am not a military family member. But I have had the honor and privilege of knowing many military families over the last seven years. My father served in the Navy during WWII long before I was born. He taught me about service, honor and integrity. And I am [...]
I want to add to the debate on the hot issue at the American Psychiatric Association this week. Retired Army general and vice chief of staff Peter Chiarelli made a strong case for re-naming post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Chiarelli advocates calling it post-traumatic stress injury. The Canadians use the term “operational stress injury” or [...]
