DAHR JAMAIL: Well, soldiers are under tremendous pressure to always, quote-unquote, “suck it up.” You know, to be a good soldier means you’re always strong, you’re always charging forward. This is how folks are trained in boot camp. So this is, of course, totally antithetical to getting treatment for PTSD. So I think most soldiers, it’s safe to say, that do come home from Iraq and Afghanistan have some sort of PTSD, whether it’s mild or severe, but they’re encouraged, by their own indoctrination and training and peer pressure and pressure from above, to just basically not deal with it.
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And even those that do get help and go get treatment, they find themselves being put back into action anyway. As of last year, more than 43,000 soldiers already listed as medically unfit to be deployed were deployed anyway. We have a situation right now in Iraq where 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq, and then over in Afghanistan 17 percent of combat troops in Afghanistan, are already on psychotropic meds to help them sleep at night and because they have PTSD and severe depression. And this is just that we know of. So, they’re encouraged not to talk about it, not to get help. And then when they do, they simply don’t tend to get the treatment that they need.
And then, as you mentioned, secondary trauma is something we rarely, if ever, hear about, where the people actually treating these veterans, they are traumatized by hearing these stories, just as journalists who report on these stories firsthand are, as well. So this is something we don’t hear about. Major Hasan was clearly overloaded. We’ve heard from his family that he was seeing one caseload of after another, not getting a break. And this is something also not being talked about and, therefore, not being addressed.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/9/when_the_war_comes_homes_iraq
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