Post-Traumatic Stress: These Unseen Wounds Cut Deep

[G_j]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111504Y.shtml

These Unseen Wounds Cut Deep
By Esther Schrader

The Los Angeles Times
Sunday 14 November 2004


WASHINGTON - Matt LaBranche got the tattoos at a seedy place down the street from the Army hospital here where he was a patient in the psychiatric ward.

The pain of the needle felt good to the 40-year-old former Army sergeant, whose memories of his nine months as a machine-gunner in Iraq had left him, he said, "feeling dead inside." LaBranche's back is now covered in images, the largest the dark outline of a sword. Drawn from his neck to the small of his back, it is emblazoned with the words LaBranche says encapsulate the war's effect on him: "I've come to bring you hell."

In soldiers like LaBranche - their bodies whole but their psyches deeply wounded - a crisis is unfolding, mental health experts say. One out of six soldiers returning from Iraq is suffering the effects of post-traumatic stress - and as more come home, that number is widely expected to grow.

The Pentagon, which did not anticipate the extent of the problem, is scrambling to find resources to address it.
..more..

[xpunkisneatx]

1. PTSD is awful

I had an Abnormal Psych class last semester and 3 Vietnam vets came into our class to talk about PTSD and how it is worse than the war that gave them the psychological difficulties. These men have a hard time keeping jobs, holding relationships, even taking a walk in their own neighborhood. People make fun of the Vietnam vets for this (you know, the infamous loud noise :flashback: jokes) but it is a serious issue that is definitly going to effect these young men coming home from Iraq. One cannot kill that many people and be psychologically OK with it. Thats why God gave us a conscience.

[Jade Fox]

2. And yet we continue to send them off in a haze of patriotism...

romaticizing war and "glory".......

We claim to "support" the troops, but the only real support would be to
stop sending them to do things that make them unable to live with them-
selves.

[G_j]

4. the truth

they don't "support the troops" by any stretch of the imagination.
They are simply destroying lives both Iraqi and American.

[leftofthedial]

3. another major problem the Pentagon did not anticipate

I don't thnk Murka is competent to wage war anymore.

[oldlady]

5. it's hit home here

I know someone who works in a state institution where they've just received their first Iraq War vet-- Depression & PTSD. Visited by Secret Service after vet confessed to therapist his hatred of Bush.

*who's really crazy here? seems a rational response to being first-person informed*

[G_j]

6. wow

I suspect the Secret Service will be visiting other wounded and PTSD victims then.