Army launches ground-breaking program to eliminate PTSD

[babylonsister]

The Sensitive Soldier

by Gail Sheehy


Can U.S. troops be rewired to be impervious to trauma? In the wake of Fort Hood, Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum launched a groundbreaking program to eliminate PTSD.


“How am I going to get people to focus not on tragedy, but on resilience?” Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum asks rhetorically as we sit in her Pentagon office. The question is now Gen. Cornum’s mission: She is charged with teaching the Army’s warriors—even in the wake of the homegrown tragedy at Fort Hood—to persevere in the face of any crisis.

Cornum’s program represents a historic shift in the Army’s training philosophy. Instead of lavishing resources on those warriors who have succumbed to post-traumatic stress, depression, drug dependency, DUI, or sought the ultimate escape of suicide, the Army this week began training its “healthy” soldiers in emotional and spiritual fitness.

Cornum is uniquely qualified to be the nation’s new director of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness. In 1991, as a flight surgeon during the first Gulf War, she was taken prisoner when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq. After three days of beatings and humiliations, this mother of a then-14-year-old daughter was released from Iraqi prisons. Her resilience and heroism as a prisoner of war convinced many in the Pentagon that women could indeed serve on the frontlines. And unlike former POWs, Cornum stayed in the military.

The new training program offers soldiers a tool kit of psychological techniques based on years of research. They can be just as useful in facing the fear of battlefield combat as in living room flare-ups. Senior military officers say the chief stressor in our current wars—when spouses and parents can call their warriors on cellphones at any time, day or night—are the fights that lead to family breakdown. But at a much deeper level is the emotional fallout from the nonstop cycling of soldiers through several deployments.

more...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-11-11/the-sensitive-soldier/full/

[maglatinavi]

1. healthy soldiers???

It sounds real dumb... it is the injured physically and emotionally that need to be healed and get support through their crisis... how dumb can the DOD be??? I can see the conditions of those afflicted to get worse...:thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :kick: :kick:

[babylonsister]

3. Did you bother to read the article? The soldiers who are

already physically and emotionally injured are getting the attention they need. This is a new approach. Whether successful or not remains to be seen, but I'm glad the military is now thinking outside the box.

[sarge43]

4. DOD can be very dumb.

Yeah, this will end well. "Use the tool kit. Not working for you? Must be your fault."

At least the problem is being acknowledged; however, sounds like a band aid on a melanoma.

[liberalmuse]

2. No more wars would be a good start.

You can't eliminate PTSD if you don't eliminate the cause.

[Mari333]

7. bingo!!!

[sarge43]

8. At minimum stop picking fights with every Third World nation

that pisses us off. There's no bottom to that hole.

[Orsino]

5. Withdrawal?

"Eliminate" PTSD? Riiiight.

I can't blame the Army for trying, and Corum seems to be talking sense. The elephant in the living room here, though--endless, needless, unwinnable wars--absolutely swamps any statistical good the Army could do in further preparing troops for the stresses and consequences of war.

Stop making 'em fight for empire, and train 'em to fight for freedom, and you will have the near-perfect Army you see on recruiting posters, one with the resources to deal intelligently and humanely with the much-lower incidence of PTSD.

[daedalus_dude]

6. Futile effort IMO. How do you treat away guilt?

[undeterred]

9. Are they developing a PTSD vaccine?

[niyad]

10. tools not to react to the horror they see and inflict? drugs???? quite frankly, the thought

of a whole group of people who are trained not to have emotional response to the horrors and evil of war scares the hell out of me.

[TCJ70]

11. How about we stop causing conflicts around the world for awhile?

We could see if that works...

[Hamlette]

12. the Bush admin's policy on PTSD was "Jesus fixes everything." Excellent article on it.

http://bostonreview.net/BR34.6/mckelvey.php

(Paul) Sullivan was working as an analyst at the Veterans Benefits Administration in Washington in early 2005 when he was called to a meeting with a top political appointee at the VA, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Michael McLendon. McLendon, an intensely focused man in a neatly pressed suit, kept a Bible on his desk at the office. Sullivan explained to McLendon and the other attendees that the rise in benefits claims the VA was noticing was caused partly by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were suffering from PTSD. “That’s too many,” McLendon said, then hit his hand on the table. “They are too young” to be filing claims, and they are doing it “too soon.” He hit the table again. The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.” At that point, he slammed his palm against the table a final time, making a loud smack. Everyone in the room fell silent.

“I was a little bit surprised,” Sullivan said, recalling the incident. “In that one comment, he appeared to be a religious fundamentalist.” For Sullivan, McLendon’s remarks reflected the views of many political appointees in the VA and revealed what was behind their efforts to reduce costs by restricting claims. The backlog of claims was immense, and veterans, often suffering extreme psychological stress, had to wait an average of five months for decisions on their requests.