VA Official: More Than 60,000 Iraq, Afghanistan Vets Diagnosed With PTSD by Jason Leopold Page 1 of 2 page(s) http://www.opednews.com

Jonathan Schulze was awarded two Purple Hearts in 2005 after a lengthy tour of duty in Iraq.

But the Marine veteran couldn't escape the war inside his head.

Drugs and alcohol temporarily numbed his pain. Yet the guilt he carried around with him having been one of a handful of soldiers in his unit to survive combat was impossible to run away from.

Schulze was suicidal.

On January 11, 2007, he sought treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder. His parents drove him to the VA hospital in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Schulze told the VA staff that he "felt suicidal," his mother, Marianne Schulze, recalled.

The hospital didn't admit him. Instead, he was told to call back the following day. He did. He was given a number: 26. The VA staff told him he'd have to wait at least two weeks to be admitted. Apparently, there were other veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who were also suffering from PTSD. It's unknown whether they met the same fate.

On January 16, 2007, Schulze placed a framed photograph of his one-year-old daughter beside him. He wrapped an electrical cord around his neck and hung himself in the basement of a friend's house in New Prague, Minnesota. He was 25 years old.

This week, Schulze's story is being retold in a federal courthouse in San Francisco as evidence of the widespread, systemic failures by the Veterans Administration to treat tens of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who suffer PTSD.

Attorneys for two veterans advocacy organizations are hoping to convince a judge that a lawsuit filed against the Department for Veterans Affairs last year and several government officials associated with the VA should receive class-action status. In their lawsuit, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, which represent about 12,000 veterans combined, claim Iraq and Afghanistan war vets are dying while waiting for the VA to treat PTSD and work through a backlog of at least half-a-million disability claims. The groups want Conti to issue a preliminary injunction to force the VA to immediately treat veterans who show signs of PTSD and are at risk of suicide.

PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that can develop in a person who witnesses, or is confronted with, a traumatic event. PTSD is said to be the most prevalent mental disorder arising from combat. According to the lawsuit, “more than any previous war, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to produce a high percentage of troops suffering from PTSD,” due to the widespread use of improvised explosive devises, multiple rotations, the ambiguity of fighting combatants dressed as civilians, and the use of National Guard members and Reservists.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs' attorneys allege that numerous VA practices stemming from a 1998 law violate the constitutional and statutory rights of veterans suffering from PTSD by denying veterans mandated medical care.

"Because of those failures, hundreds of thousands of men and women who have suffered grievous injuries fighting in the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being abandoned," states the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for Northern California. "Unless systemic and drastic measures are instituted immediately, the costs to these veterans, their families, and our nation will be incalculable, including broken families, a new generation of unemployed and homeless veterans, increases in drug abuse and alcoholism, and crushing burdens on the health care delivery system and other social services in our communities."

VA attorneys had argued in court papers filed last month that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were not "entitled" to the five-years of free healthcare upon their return from combat as mandated by Congress in the "Dignity for Wounded Warriors Act." Rather, the VA argued, medical treatment for the war veterans was discretionary based on the level of funding available in the VA's budget.

On Tuesday, the second day of testimony before U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti, Dr. Gerald Cross, the undersecretary for health at the Veterans Health Administration, made a startling admission during cross-examination by the plaintiffs' attorneys that would appear to contradict the agency's position.

Cross admitted that veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were not only entitled to free healthcare, "there is no co-pay," he said.

Perhaps most startling, however, was testimony by Cross stating that of the 300,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars treated at VA hospitals, more than half were diagnosed with a serious mental condition, 68,000 of which were cases of PTSD.

His testimony marks the first time a Bush administration official has provided detailed information about the psychological impact of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on combat veterans. Cross testified that five years after the invasion of Iraq, the VA has still not completed a study on the link between suicides and PTSD among combat veterans. However, he said such a study is currently in the works and may be published soon.

Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, Paul Sullivan, said more than 5,000 veterans commit suicide per year.

Dr. Arthur Blank, a renowned expert on PTSD who has worked closely with the VA, testified that about 30 percent of Iraqi war veterans are likely suffering from PTSD due to multiple deployments and the VA is not doing enough to care for them.

"I think it's because of multiple deployments, which means one is exposed to trauma over and over again," Blank testified.

Last week, Daniel Cooper, the VA's undersecretary for benefits, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, abruptly resigned. Sullivan's group had called for Cooper's resignation two weeks ago in light of the huge backlog of benefits claims that have yet to be processed by Cooper's department.

Last August, the Pentagon's Inspector General revealed that Cooper used his government position to promote the work of a fundamentalist Christian organization, a violation of the laws governing the separation of church and state.

Cooper, and several high-ranking military officials, appeared in a promotional video for Christian Embassy, an evangelical organization that evangelizes members of the military and politicians in Washington, DC via daily Bible studies and outreach events. The group holds prayer breakfasts on Wednesdays in the Pentagons executive dining room, according to the organization's web site.

Mikey Weinstein, the founder and president of The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, whose organization called for a federal investigation after government officials were discovered to have participated in the Christian Embassy promotional video, said Cooper is a "disgrace."

"The D in Dan stands for disgrace," Weinstein said in an interview. "He's a disgrace to the United States Naval Academy, the United States Navy, the US armed forces, the Veterans Administration, and the United States of America. Why? Because we have him on videotape making it very clear to the world that the most important part of his job was to push the fundamentalist agenda of the Christian right over his specified duties at the Veterans Administration. Dan Cooper has used the United States Constitution as his personal roll of toilet paper. I wish him as much good fortune as he has provided to our honorable and noble veterans; none."

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Jason Leopold is senior editor and reporter for Truthout. He received a Project Censored award in 2007 for his story on Halliburton's work in Iran. Jason is the author of the National Bestseller, News Junkie, a memoir. He is the editor of BackgroundBriefing.org, a new online political magazine scheduled to launch in March. He can be reached at jasonleopold [at] hotmail.com.

see: www.iava.org!!

send them your dimes, your nickels, your quarters and one thousand bucks! They do more than all the rest put together on this AND homelessness among veterans.

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/showtags.php?tid=5025&tag=/Veterans+Mental+Healthhttp://ladybroadoak.blogspot.com/search?q=ptsd

http://ladybroadoak.blogspot.com/search?q=ptsd

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_virginia_070620_about_bloody_time_2c_b.htm
My article about what it took to move the VA on this issue which ran in OpEd News

I did a whole series on PTSD and panic disorder, but my search engine doesn't bring them up????

Most PTSD Treatments Not Proven Effective
Scientists Find That One Therapy Is Shown to Help Disorder; Evidence of Drugs' Benefits Inconclusive

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 19, 2007; A03

The majority of treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder that are used to treat hundreds of thousands of veterans lack rigorous scientific evidence that they are effective, according to a report issued yesterday by a panel of the federal government's top scientists.

The report by the National Academies emphasized that the therapies might not be useless. Rather, it said, the evidence is weak when it comes to drawing any kind of conclusion about most of them. The findings of the panel, widely considered the nation's most influential scientific arbiter, will have far-reaching consequences. The report comes when awareness of PTSD has risen as a result of its incidence among veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"If a treatment that is not shown to be efficacious is nevertheless delivered to veterans, and if the treatment is relatively inert, even if it does not harm the veterans, it may demoralize the veteran," said Richard McNally, a Harvard University psychologist and PTSD expert. "Providing treatments that do not have a good basis in evidence can result in people not improving, therefore getting demoralized and therefore not seeking treatment that can actually help them."

The report did find strong evidence that one particular treatment known as exposure therapy was effective; the technique asks patients to repeatedly reimagine traumatic events as a way to make the events lose their potency. In a statement, the Department of Veterans Affairs said it was ramping up its ability to provide this therapy to patients.

But the panel failed to find evidence that any medication was effective in treating PTSD -- this included the drugs Paxil and Zoloft, which have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat the disorder.

"A very high percentage of people who have been diagnosed with PTSD are on medications," said Larry Scott, the founder of the advocacy group VA Watchdog dot Org, which serves as an information clearinghouse for veterans.

Most of the evidence supporting the use of medications and psychological therapies for PTSD has been assembled by pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs or by researchers with conflicts of interest in the outcome of the studies, and lack independent and rigorous proof, the report said.

The researchers also found there was insufficient evidence to support the use of a range of psychotherapies known as cognitive restructuring, coping skills training, eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, and group therapy. Cognitive restructuring is a technique that trains patients to reinterpret a traumatic event from a different perspective. In the eye-movement therapy, patients are asked to think about traumatic memories while tracking quick movements of a therapist's finger.

A host of complicated political, economic and medical issues swirl around the issue of PTSD in a time of war. Many veterans advocacy groups are convinced that the government is trying to limit the spiraling costs of treating the flashbacks, anxieties and co-occurring psychiatric disorders that mark PTSD.

"I see the IOM report and the VA's acceptance as an indication that the agency will continue to move away from pharmaceutical-based therapies and group therapy for veterans with PTSD and continue to push their agenda of cognitive processing therapy as a 'cure,' as stated by former VA Secretary Jim Nicholson," Scott added. "If VA declares a veteran 'cured' of PTSD, this will mean the reduction or loss of disability compensation."

In the new report, scientists said evidence for many issues besides treatment efficacy was also limited. It is not clear, for example, how early treatment for PTSD should be started or how long such therapy should be offered.

"We found much of the research on PTSD to have major limitations when judged against contemporary standards for conducting trials," said Alfred O. Berg, professor of family medicine at the University of Washington, who chaired the panel that conducted a comprehensive review of the evidence for PTSD treatments.

Part of the problem, Berg said, is that studies for PTSD have been conducted over a long period of time. The modern standards the panel sought to apply simply happened to be much higher.

"Our report certainly must raise questions about treatments and whether they are effective or not, but our assessment of inadequate evidence does not mean the treatments are ineffective," Berg said. "It could mean some of the therapies are more effective than the exposure therapy, where we did find proof of effectiveness" but only that the other therapies lack evidence to show that this is the case.

Berg and another author, David Matchar, a professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center, said a sustained national effort for high-quality research on PTSD, with a special focus on veterans and minority groups, was needed.

Edna B. Foa, a professor of clinical psychology in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the pioneers in developing exposure therapy as a PTSD treatment said the technique was based on the insight that many victims of trauma do all they can to avoid being reminded of traumatic events.

A rape victim might avoid going out in the evenings, while someone injured in an auto accident might avoid getting into any kind of vehicle. Soldiers might avoid movies or TV shows about war.

Two things happen in this process, Foa said. Patients come to replace actual recollections of trauma with other perceptions -- taking on blame and guilt, for example, for being afraid. Second, by avoiding situations, patients can fail to see that much of life is not dangerous -- the movie is only fiction.

Foa said she has patients recount traumatic events aloud with their eyes closed. She records the patient, and then has the patient listen to the tape repeatedly.

"People don't recover because they avoid thinking about the trauma," Foa said. "Every time the trauma comes to the mind, they push it away. They don't allow themselves to process and digest the memory, so it keeps on haunting them with nightmares, flashbacks."

Foa also has patients make lists of situations that trigger anxiety and encourages them to deliberately expose themselves to the least-frightening situation. As people realize that many situations are harmless, Foa said they replace images of self-doubt and helplessness with a more healthy outlook.