PTSD Troops Get “Trauma Avoidance” Instead of Care

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by Chaplain Kathie

 

When we read about all the advances being made, the programs the DOD has come up with to “help” the troops recover, there is always something that does not add up because at the same time we read about what they are doing, somewhere hidden from our eyes, problems lurk in the darkness like a bad horror movie.

The bad numbers are all going up. Suicides, attempted suicides, drug overdose deaths, you name it, and those numbers show a growing problem instead of a a spreading healing. This article just goes to show that no matter how much civilians learn about PTSD, no matter how society addresses traumatic events, the DOD lacks military intelligence equal to the rest of us humans.

Trauma teams rush to take care of survivors of traumatic events just as they rush to help the responders, yet when it comes to men and women in the military, they are still being treated like machines. When these human machines stop performing, they are “useless” and made to feel as if they are worth-less than they were before. Read this whole piece and I bet your blood will boil like mine did.  This is not trauma “care” but it is trauma avoidance.

In Army’s Trauma Care Units, Feeling Warehoused
Posted on 27/11/10
By JAM
COLORADO SPRINGS — A year ago, Specialist Michael Crawford wanted nothing more than to get into Fort Carson’s Warrior Transition Battalion, a special unit created to provide closely managed care for soldiers with physical wounds and severe psychological trauma.

A strapping Army sniper who once brimmed with confidence, he had returned emotionally broken from Iraq, where he suffered two concussions from roadside bombs and watched several platoon mates burn to death. The transition unit at Fort Carson, outside Colorado Springs, seemed the surest way to keep suicidal thoughts at bay, his mother thought.

It did not work. He was prescribed a laundry list of medications for anxiety, nightmares, depression and headaches that made him feel listless and disoriented. His once-a-week session with a nurse case manager seemed grossly inadequate to him. And noncommissioned officers — soldiers supervising the unit — harangued or disciplined him when he arrived late to formation or violated rules.

Last August, Specialist Crawford attempted suicide with a bottle of whiskey and an overdose of painkillers. By the end of last year, he was begging to get out of the unit.

“It is just a dark place,” said the soldier, who is waiting to be medically discharged from the Army. “Being in the W.T.U. is worse than being in Iraq.”

Created in the wake of the scandal in 2007 over serious shortcomings at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Warrior Transition Units were intended to be sheltering way stations where injured soldiers could recuperate and return to duty or gently process out of the Army. There are currently about 7,200 soldiers at 32 transition units across the Army, with about 465 soldiers at Fort Carson’s unit.

But interviews with more than a dozen soldiers and health care professionals from Fort Carson’s transition unit, along with reports from other posts, suggest that the units are far from being restful sanctuaries. For many soldiers, they have become warehouses of despair, where damaged men and women are kept out of sight, fed a diet of powerful prescription pills and treated harshly by noncommissioned officers. Because of their wounds, soldiers in Warrior Transition Units are particularly vulnerable to depression and addiction, but many soldiers from Fort Carson’s unit say their treatment there has made their suffering worse.

Some soldiers in the unit, and their families, described long hours alone in their rooms, or in homes off the base, aimlessly drinking or playing video games.

“In combat, you rely on people and you come out of it feeling good about everything,” said a specialist in the unit. “Here, you’re just floating. You’re not doing much. You feel worthless.”
Army trauma care units feeling warehoused

We will keep seeing the bad numbers go up but will we remember why?

This is from HBO after Wartorn.

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