05/17/07 - -- -SAN FRANCISCO, May 15 (IPS) - At the beginning of May, Corporal Cloy Richards tried to kill himself.

"He punched out all his windows and cut major arteries," his mother Tina Richards told IPS. "He had to go to the hospital because he almost bled to death."

Cloy Richards, who lives in rural Salem, Missouri, has served two deployments in the Marine Corps in Iraq. The military lists him as 80-percent combat disabled.

His mother says he has knee and arm injuries, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder, and currently has a claim pending with the Army for a traumatic brain injury.

"It's something that affects us every single day," Tina said, "when he's 23 years old and he can't even climb the stairs. He has bad nightmares where he thinks he's back in Iraq."

Richards said her son sustained most of his injuries after his first tour in Iraq, adding that the family protested his second deployment to no avail. After four years on active duty, Cloy Richards is now in the individual ready reserve and faces the possibility of a third deployment to Iraq.

New guidelines released by the Pentagon in December allow commanders to redeploy soldiers suffering from traumatic stress disorders.

According to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, service-members with "a psychiatric disorder in remission, or whose residual symptoms do not impair duty performance" may be considered for duty downrange. It lists post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a "treatable" problem.

PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to an event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. A person having a flashback may lose touch with reality and believe that the traumatic incident is happening all over again.

"It's just terrifying," said Dr. Karen Seal, a clinician at San Francisco's Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Centre who treats soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological illnesses.

Seal told IPS that patients under her care have been deployed despite serious mental health conditions.

"I feel like writing them a medical excuse," she said, "but that's not my responsibility as a VA clinician. Because I'm a VA provider, I don't have the authority to do that."

According to a study co-authored by Seal and her colleagues at the Centre, about one- third of the more than 100,000 returning veterans seen at VA facilities between Sep. 30, 2001 and Sep. 30, 2005 were diagnosed with mental illness or a psycho-social disorder such as homelessness and marital problems, including domestic violence. Over half suffered from more than one disorder.

Other researchers suggest those statistics may only represent the tip of the iceberg. Many veterans, they note, don't come forward to seek care. The stigma associated with post- traumatic stress disorder may account for part of this gap, they say.

In addition, according to recent report by Linda Bilmes of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, waiting lists for returning veterans are "so long as to effectively deny treatment to a number of veterans."

In the May 2006 edition of Psychiatric News, Bilmes notes that VA Undersecretary of Health Policy Coordination Frances Murphy wrote that when services are available, "waiting lists render that care virtually inaccessible."

There is also the issue of geography.

"One of the disconnects and failures in planning for this war is that the Veterans Administration is essentially configured in an urban way," Bilmes told IPS. "That makes a lot of sense for recruiting specialists and staffing the facilities. However, recruiting for the military in this war tends to come primarily from small, rural America. So, what we don't have is enough mental health care for veterans in these rural communities when they come home."

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Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on Conscious talk radio www.conscioustalk.net

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Jai Daemion

The 'Walking Dead' meet... 'The Walking Dead!' When the thousands of battle-worn soldiers return to our small towns and bigger cities as 'The Walking Dead,' they will be greeted by... The Walking Dead - those who put them in harms way; those who kept them there for multiple tours; those who were in a place to see exactly what was happening and took no action; those whose primal feelings of impotence and need for authority to tell them what to do, have left them unable to see what is right and to stand up for their country. You know they're going to find out: those soldiers will come back to something they cannot be prepared for. And who will they find is really responsible for their past and future pain and suffering? Probably not the Iraqi 'insurgents.' Probably not Sadaam. And certainly not Osama. It was their own friends and families who kept them there, who would not speak out... who could not learn. Let anyone who can still feel any compassion in this country try to accept that we have caused 1,000,000 Iraqi deaths (since 1991), bear the shame and find some way to open our arms to these betrayed and hurting women and men of our military. And I hope that I can do my part. by Jaed (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 12 comments) on Monday, May 21, 2007 at 6:11:49 PM

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Teilhard

WELL SAID, JAED Well said, Jaed ~ Those who have remained silent during this crime against humanity bear just as much blame as Cheney,Bush, Wolfowitz,Rumsfeld, Rice and others who orchestrated this fiasco in Iraq. Allen L Roland by teilhard (459 articles, 0 quicklinks, 84 comments) on Monday, May 21, 2007 at 8:59:10 PM

 

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