Iraq War
ddobbs | June 15, 2009
Photo: Tyler Hicks, via Scientific American
What if you could predict which troops are most likely to get PTSD from combat exposure -- and takes steps to either bolster them mentally or keep them out of combat situations? A new study suggests we could make a start on that right now -- and cut combat PTSD rates in half by simply keeping the least mentally and physically fit soldiers away from combat zones.
The study was part of the Millenium Study, huge, prospective study in which US Department of Defense researchers have been tracking the physical and mental health of nearly 100,000 service…
ddobbs | May 18, 2009A few weeks ago, when I posted that "Uh-oh: POW benefit claimants exceed recorded POWs, one reader wrote saying the post made her wonder whether I have "a problem with veterans." As one reader noted, a concern with bogus POWs suggests I have a problem with -- well, bogus POWs. Should it not bother us when people masquerading as POWs are collecting benefits and kudos and sympathies they didn't earn â and which others earned through rather excruciating means?
Now it's bothered a couple members of Congress who served in the military, as the press release from Rep. Mike Coffman, R-CO, describes…
ddobbs | April 24, 2009
via Nicholson cartoons
Veteran, author, and blogger Kelly Williams, who was there, ponders what torture does to the torturers:
There have been lots of questions raised -- about the history and effectiveness of these techniques, the impact on those tortured, the larger foreign policy implications -- all of which are important considerations. There is, however, one aspect of the conversation that I believe has been neglected: What does this do to those committing the acts?
[snip]
Some of those who participated in the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (please check out that site -- it is totally…
ddobbs | April 22, 2009
As the comments and correspondence about my PTSD story and posts accrue, I've been pondering ways to pull out some of the most interesting, powerful, and affecting. I finally decided to just start posting some, sometimes with commentary, sometimes without. This is a story of many different colors and textures.
I'll start with this excerpt from a long, eloquent blog response to my story about PTSD at Scientific American by Kayla Williams, a vet of the Iraq War who blogs at VetVoice. Williams is accumulating quite a strong run of posts there, including posts on torture, being a woman veteran…
ddobbs | April 20, 2009Who stands most at risk of PTSD? A new study of PTSD in US veterans of the current Iraq and Afghanistan wars suggests that you can identify the most vulnerable -- soldiers who stand 2 to 3 times the risk of their peers -- with fairly simple measures of mental and physical health.
The study, conducted by the U.S. Navy's Tyler Smith and collegues, is part of an ongoing longitudinal study of over 150,000 U.S. soldiers. The Millennium Cohort Study began collected comprehensive health data on U.S. soldiers in 2001. This study draws on that data to compare health status before deployment to Iraq…
ddobbs | April 13, 2009One hopes there's a good explanation for this somewhere: According to this AP story, the number of people collecting VA benefits for being POWs exceeds -- by hundreds -- the number of actual POWs ever held (much less still alive). From the AP:
Prisoners of war suffer in ways most veterans don't, enduring humiliating forced marches, torture or other trauma that may haunt them long afterward. In partial recompense, the government extends them special benefits, from free parking and tax breaks to priority in medical treatment.
Trouble is, some of the much-admired recipients of these benefits…
ddobbs | March 20, 2009A few weeks ago, Matt Stevens, the National Guard captain and medic who served in Iraq and whom I mentioned in my Scientific American article, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap, wrote me an email about the social unease he often encountered when he showed any behavior that might remind people he had served in Iraq -- a greater seriousness, an impatience with petty concerns or inefficiency, or even just talking about the place.
I have begun to think of military PTSD as to some extent a civilian problem rather than a soldier problem. To expand slightly here; civilians/politicians send soldiers…
ddobbs | March 18, 2009It didn't take long for my Scientific American story on PTSD to draw the sort of fire I expected. A doctor blogging as "egalwan" at Follow Me Here writes
[Dobbs] is critical of a culture which "seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD." To critics like this, the overwhelming incidence of PTSD diagnoses in returning Iraqi veterans is not a reflection of the brutal meaningless horror to which many of the combatants were exposed but of a sissy culture that can no longer suck it up.
Doctor or not, he's seeing politics where my…
ddobbs | March 16, 2009Below are materials supplementing my story "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap," Scientific American, April 2009. (You can find the story here and my blog post introducing it here.) I'm starting with annotated sources, source materials, and a bit of multimedia. I hope to add a couple sidebars that didn't fit in the main piece -- though those may end up at the main blog, so you may want to keep an eye there or subscribe via RSS or Atom.
Main sources and documents in "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap."
These are organized by story section, roughly in the order the relevant material appears.…
ddobbs | March 14, 2009
My story in the April 2009 Scientific American story, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap", just went online. Here's the opening:
In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest
period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens's problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: the condition was real enough, but as a diagnosis he saw it being wildly, even dangerously, overextended.
[snip]
"Clinicians aren't separating the…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2008tags: The Cost of War, documentary, streaming video
In just one tiny little second, America spends enough money to support me for six months in a lifestyle that is beyond what I have now, by killing innocent people in Iraq. Worse, this country spends more money in one minute than I've earned in my entire lifetime, so we can kill innocent Iraqis! DISGUSTING! PATHETIC! [1:30]
More suggestions as to what george bush and his buddies can do with that money they are wasting on slaughtering innocents.