Must read article about how Bush Admin.'s faith based ideology negatively impacted veterans

[beachmom]

I really am floored by this article.

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

Here is just one excerpt, but read the whole thing:

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.

...

When I asked him years later about the meeting, McLendon laughed. Then his face darkened in anger. “Anybody who knows me knows I wouldn’t talk that way.”

Nevertheless, McLendon was open about the skepticism he felt toward the diagnosis of PTSD, calling it “a made-up term,” which has “taken on a life of its own.” As he spoke about the diagnosis, he pounded the table with the side of his hand more than ten times, hitting it so hard that the wooden surface shook. “Do I think they have a mental illness and should be stigmatized for the rest of their life?” he asked. “What gives a psychiatrist the right to do that?”

Later, in an email about our conversation, he wrote:

(PTSD) is not a diagnosis based on empirical evidence, but rather . . . it is an artificial construct erected by a vote of selected psychiatrists. This does not mean that there are not problems that certain individuals do have issues that need to be addressed. But rather, it means that we have created policies and programs that have not served veterans well.

He recommended several books on the subject, including The Selling of DSM, whose authors, Stuart Kirk and Herb Kutchins, show a deep mistrust about the disorder and the scientific rhetoric surrounding the diagnosis. McLendon’s outlook seems to have had a significant impact on the way veterans are treated upon their return from war.

Apparently, conservatives think the anti-war movment during the Vietnam War "invented" PTSD. The political appointees to the VA all believed this AND that faith was the only cure for problems, including (barf) passing around the book Rick Warren's "The Purpose Driven Life".

There is this though:

The 2010 budget proposed by President Obama includes the largest funding increase for veterans in the past thirty years, and much of it is devoted to treatment of PTSD. The new secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Eric Shinseki, a retired general who was injured in Vietnam (and fought with Rumsfeld over the size of the force needed in Iraq), has shown a strong commitment to the care of veterans. Unfortunately, bureaucracies are slow to respond. After years of neglect during the Bush administration, veterans now have nearly one million claims pending, a record high for the agency.

[karynnj]

1. These comments say so much about the mentality of the Bush people

Only at the very extreme, could faith in God and country make PTSD less likely. The same extreme that motivates suicide bombers, who could sit in an airport gate filled with innocent people, including little children and babies, and not feel any remorse that their intended actions will cause the murder of these innocents, as well as their own lives. At that extreme, they might be able to see horrible things, both that we did and which were done to us and face the fear every day of death with the acceptance that their God not only accepted it, but was happy with it.

It is likely that, upon return, that some people will find some comfort or peace through religion. I suspect that among religious people, if they are lucky, supportive religious people may in fact do what psychologists do for others. For some it provides support in forgiving others or accepting that you can be redeemed in spite of what you did in your own eyes. I know personally that some people with chronic depression have been helped through religious beliefs. However, it is not an answer for everyone and even some deeply religious people may need psychiatric help beyond this.

The conservative view that PTSD was "made up" by the anti-war movement shows the extent of their denial. It also, when turned around, points to one of the greatest contributions of the veteran part of the anti-war movement and why their advocacy for veterans with PTSD was so necessary. Just as with these Bush people, the government ignored the pain of these vets and the vets had to fight to get PTSD accepted and paid for. Kerry has spoken of their efforts, working with a psychologist, I think from Yale, to develop support groups to deal with this. It suggests that the anti-war movement cared more for the vets than the government did. Accepting the complicated truth of the effect of war on soldiers is incompatible with simplistic views of our soldiers.

The other thing that is sad is that he is very up front in his view that anyone diagnosed with a mental illness has a life long stigma. I am not completely surprised, but the bluntness with which he says it, ignoring that some of these people will likely become stronger because of it, shows a person who is not thoughtful enough to have had that position.

[TayTay]

2. Seeing humanity at it's worst is not something than can be written off

I agree that in many cases a turn to religious sources can help people. I have seen this in people in distress in my own life.

However, we cannot find the answer to the question of human evil in a book. To go to war is to, by definition, encounter the worst depths of human behavior. Life, in war, is cheap. People randomly die while others randomly live. There is no reward for good behavior, and the best of people often die because they are "good people" who put the survival of others ahead of themselves. This very randomness, this very measure of chaos and existence without "a purpose-drive life" is the essence of war. Embracing war embraces a life lived without the possibility of redemptive action or recourse to redemptive love. It is the void or the abyss, a state that allows only for it's own mere existence.

The Battle of Tarawa, part of the Pacific campaign of WWII, occurred 66 years ago this week. My father was a Radioman and part of the Naval Force that transported and accompanied the Marine invasion of that small atoll. Tarawa was a horrible, bitter, excruciating battle with extensive repercussions for the rest of the war in the Pacific. Part of those repercussions were the realization of just how awful and hard-fought the taking of the Pacific was going to be. The human cost of this invasion was horrific and absolutely shocking for an American command structure to absorb.

My father never got over what happened in those 4 days at Tarawa. It was a part of his soul from the time he fought to land on the beach there to the day he died. His experience at Tarawa was so awful, so damaging to his very soul that he was unable to cope with it. He spent months at a hospital in Hawaii with "battle fatigue" which was, in itself, a source of internal horror and conflict to him. (Real men get over what happens in war. He never forgave himself for not getting over it.)

My Dad was a Catholic. His comfort was a strong belief in the various incarnations of "Our Lady, Mother of Sorrows" and "Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering." He sought, in his appeals to "Our Lady" a gentle form of forgiveness sometimes at the same time he rejected it because his actions had made him unforgivable. He went on with his life, married, fathered 8 children, participated in civic life and lived. But the sorrow, the depression, the sudden moments when he was back at Tarawa, never went away.

I loved my Dad and loved the gentle man who loved poetry and preached kindness and understanding and forgiveness. I loved the man who read "The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath" to me. I loved the man who needed mercy and forgiveness even as I struggled with how to give it to him. I bet there are daughters and sons of those coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq who will struggle as I did with their parents. It lasts forever. It never stops and it never really heals; at best, you learn how to live with it and learn how to love around it.

PTSD is a real thing. It affects real people. It will be one of the lasting affects of our going to war over the last few years and a lasting legacy on untold numbers of returning soldiers, but also on their families who struggle to love those who wander in fog from time to time. Religion can indeed be a comfort, but it cannot erase all. Love, religious or otherwise, cannot erase some wounds, no matter how much we wish it could. We, as a nation, have to be aware of that and embrace this as a "cost of war" and be there for our wounded. These hurts are not a matter of loss of will or weakness, they are the very essence of being human and we have to commit to helping, as best we can, with getting our veterans through this. For them, and for all the daughters and sons who will wander the edges of the abyss from time to time, wondering what to do and how to render comfort and mercy, we have to commit to long-term care and research on this problem.

http://www.bostoncatholic.org/Being-Catholic/Content.aspx?id=11446">A Prayer for the Dead
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears attend to the voice of my supplication.
...
O Lord, hear my prayer. And let my cry come to you.
O God, creator and redeemer of all the faithful, grant to the souls of your departed servants the forgiveness of all their sins.
Through my prayer, may they obtain the pardon they have always desired. Amen

[karynnj]

3. It is so sad that a man as kind, gentle and caring had to live with that burden

Given the intensity of what the soldiers have experienced in multiple tours, reading this it is hard as so many will face years of pain.

[TayTay]

4. And it makes reading that article so much harder

Our best gift to others is our own humanity. We share not just our joy at the good times and good things that happen in life. We share our sense of human failings and our own inability to make sense of life, from time to time. Oddly, this sharing, this common experience of what can and cannot be done in life is often our greatest gift to others. I am human. I know loss. I have experienced pain and suffering. Come, sit with me a while and we can talk about things good and bad. It's okay to express negative thoughts, we don't have to bottle them up because they are uncomfortable to express.

I am offended by the shallowness of the religious view offered to some of our people in pain. It appears to me to callously paper over real feeling with fake pseudo-pop aphorisms about cheering up and not thinking about bad things. This doesn't work and it is offensive to some of the real things that the majesty of religion possesses. I was as offended by that as by anything else in the article. ("Out of the depths of hell I cry to thee Oh Lord" is an acknowledgment of human pain and a desire to see through it. What a far cry from the, "if you really believed in Jesus you wouldn't feel bad things" attitude in that article. How ugly and demeaning and shallow and offensive and stupid. How inhuman, in effect.)

I remember seeing Jon Soltz at an event a few years back. The founder of VoteVets finally sought help for PTSD. He simply said, "I am not the man I used to be. Help me." We should indeed help him, by or with the means that signal "help" to him.

[beachmom]

5. Thank you for such wise words, Tay, as well as sharing the story of your father.

I think it also debunks PTSD as only being a "disease of unpopular wars", as there was no more just a war than World War Two. I would add the caveat that the Germans and the Japanese (and the Soviets, for that matter) were not the ONLY ones to behave badly. Studs Terkel opened my eyes to that truth. Many people fail to grasp that once war has begun, the time for diplomacy, civility, and humanity is over. We like to compartamentalize war into "good" and "bad", but the truth is there is only horrific, tragic, and barbaric. We humans like to think of ourselves as different, but we are in many respects worse than the animal kingdom once the drumbeat of war has commenced.

I speak with some knowledge of dealing with trauma, and the truth is you are just going to feel like s*** for a while! No pop psychology, self improvement book, religious fundamentalism will power, or any other remedy given by a church, psychologist, or medical doctor is going to stop the pain. In fact, if one is left numb, that is a bad sign. It is best to go through the pain right away and get it over with. Religion is not for everyone, so that should never be pushed on a person as the solution to their problems. I suggest a returning soldier be allowed to be real (and be angry, full of grief, be sad, etc., not phony), adhere to a normal daily routine, exercise, counseling from a GOOD psychologist (people need to be picky and shop around until they find a good one), and some pleasure within moderation like a glass of wine with a piece of chocolate cake on the side. And don't forget doing things one enjoys like a favorite uplifting movie, being with friends, etc. Medication only has limited effectiveness, and should only play a small role in recovery; it should always accompany counseling.

I may be a little controversial here, but if the family has the means, they should throw caution to the wind and spend money, possibly out of network and the VA to get the best care possible -- a recommendation from a friend, family or primary doctor is key. The best psychologists and psychiatrists do not deal with insurance, which means paying the money up front, and then trying to get reimbursement (i.e. out of network). I have noticed this in mental health: you will get 2nd rate doctors in network. Now don't get me wrong: insurance pays for some of the care, but it is a lot out of pocket. Perhaps the VA is better than the private sector, but look at that guy who shot up Fort Hood. His colleagues knew he was incompetent, possibly psychotic, yet the bureacracy was set up for them not to want to bother firing him. I think in all other fields where it is obvious (like an orthopedic doctor or a heart surgeon) such incompetence would not be tolerated. But since so many think that the mental health field is a sham, nobody cares when there are so many bad psychologists in insurance networks and working for the VA. Obviously, paying 20% or more of the bill is costly and ridiculous. But this is a person's life, and since the system is so flawed, I suggest private practice out of network with a full recommendation, unless someone in network is personally recommended.

Just my two cents.