The Brain Trauma Vets-An Epidemic of Psychological Wounds

[babylonsister]

An Epidemic of Psychological Wounds
The Brain Trauma Vets

By CONN HALLINAN

“We are facing a massive mental health problem as a result of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a country, we have not responded adequately to this problem. Unless we act urgently and wisely, we’ll be dealing with an epidemic of service-related psychological wounds for years to come.”

--Bobby Muller, President Veterans For America


David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), calls traumatic brain injury (TBI) the “silent epidemic.” It is the most common cause of death for U.S. adults under the age of 45, deadlier than AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis, spinal cord injury and breast cancer combined. It strikes down 1.6 million Americans a year. And while TBI may be a quiet wound, its consequences for victims, family, friends and co-workers can be catastrophic.

Adding to that 1.6 million figure are two wars whose signature injury are blast-induced head wounds. A recent study by the General Accounting Office found that, “Traumatic brain injury has emerged as the leading injury among U.S. forces serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

According to a Walter Reed Hospital study, “closed brain” injuries—injuries with no visible marks—outnumber “penetrating brain injuries” seven to one. Other researchers put the ratio much higher.

“We are looking at a very frightening situation,” says Dr. Judith Landau, psychiatrist and president of Linking Human Systems in Boulder, Colorado, who works with vets and their families.

And yet, according to Dr. Michael Weiner, professor of medicine, radiology, psychiatry and neurology at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), and director of the Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease at the Veteran’s Administration Medical Center,

“There is a lot more that we don’t know about it {TBI}, than we do.”

For starters it’s hard to spot. “Our scans show nothing,” says Weiner.

TBI is a slippery beast, or “murky” as Weiner puts it. It can cause symptoms ranging from depression and uncontrollable rages, to irritable bowels and emotional disengagement. It can suddenly appear long after the incident that caused it, and it is difficult and complex to treat.

more...

http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan06172008.html

[stillcool]

1. You would think they would have learned something....

I've seen bodies ripped to pieces by bullets, blown into millions of scraps by bombs, and pierced by booby traps. I’ve smelled the stench of bodies burned. I’ve heard the air sound like it was boiling from rounds flying back and forth. I’ve lived an insanity others should never live..."
-- Dennis Tenety, Fire in the Hole----

Haunted
by Mark D. Van Ells
Did the soldiers of the Good War really come home psychologically unscathed by the horror and stress they experienced? Or did they simply suffer in silence?
by Mark D. Van Ells

For many, continued exposure to combat conditions wore them down. "It was not going into battle the one time, but the going back again and again, that finally got to you," " a sailor from the USS Yorktown told Jones in a Honolulu bar in May 1942. A navy veteran from Texas compared his service on a destroyer off the Tokyo mainland during the Okinawa campaign to a death sentence:

They strap him in the electric chair, he can see the warden's hand on the switch, he knows he is going to die, and he waits all day. Then at the end of the day they come and get him, take him back to his cell, and all night the other prisoners try to kill him. The next day they come get him and strap him in the chair and he expects to die again--this goes on and on day and night for three months....
---------------------------------
Despite the host of conflicting opinions about battle fatigue, few people questioned that combat had profound effects on the minds of soldiers. "We were all psychotic, inmates of the greatest madhouse of history," claimed Manchester. Two psychiatrists who worked with veterans after the war noted that "mild traumatic states...are almost universal among combat troops immediately after battle.
http://www.americainwwii.com/stories/haunted.htm

●-Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II About 25-30 percent of WWII casualties were psychological cases; under very severe conditions that number could reach as high as 70-80 percent. In Italy, mental problems accounted for 56 percent of total casualties. On Okinawa, where fighting conditions were particularly horrific, 7,613 Americans died, 31,807 sustained physical wounds, and 26, 221 were mental casualties.-Adams, 95
Trying to repress feelings, they drank, gambled suffered paralyzing depression, and became inarticulately violent. A paratrooper’s wife would “sit for hours and just hold him when he shook.”
Afterward, he started beating her and the children: “He became a brute.” And they divorced —-Adams, 150

Da Nang, Vietnam. A young Marine private waits on the beach during the Marine landing. 08/03/1965
Some aspects of war are timeless. The emotional trauma it causes is one of them

[babylonsister]

2. Your post deserves its own thread. People need to learn just

how FUBARed this occupation is. Why didn't anyone learn anything from history?

[stillcool]

3. I posted it on Memorial Day...

with a little more info..interestingly there is still controversy over the number of shell-shock, battle fatigue, and PTSD victims going all the way back to WWI. With each war there is a new name. The least amount of information available is from the Vietnam War. And, with the "Vietnam Syndrome" they actually tried to attribute the malady to the lack of support for the war at home. Unfrigging-believable. Then there was Agent Orange, and the Gulf War Syndrome. It never ends. And the VA is so surprised!

[old mark]

4. StillCool47

An old friend of mine died two years ago, of cancer. He was 57. He served in Vietnam in the Marine Corps, for a little over 1 1/2 years, and I have no doubt at all that this caused, directly or indirectly, to his early death. He never recovered from his service and it eventually killed him.
I was in the Army, in the 82d Airborne Division, at the same time he was in the Marine Corps.
I still dream about it, and the dreams are not good.
I spent nearly a year as a patient in an Army hospital.
I'd love to see Bush sentenced to serve as an orderly in an Army hospital for a few years.
Even he might learn something.

mark

[stillcool]

5. I have been on the outside looking in..

my Dad got all fucked up in WWII. I never lived with him, but his sorrow make a big impact on me. Then when I got older, I was surrounded by Vietnam vets. The most memorable thing for me was what was not said. Nothing about the war. Not one word. Not even when I went to group counseling at the VA Hospital. It was like there was an unspoken language that did not need to be verbalized. I will never understand what you went through, but somehow it touches my soul.