Excellent Treatment Programs Are in Place, And Yet a “Walking Poster Child” For PTSD Still Can’t Get Help
So here’s the SitRep on military-version PTSD. We know it exists. We know that it afflicts a high number of combat vets. And the DOD is all over this issue, with educational programs, treatment centers, research studies, encouragement, awareness campaigns, targeted support, and beacoup portions of can-do talk.
The individual troop, then, can rest assured that if he or she comes up with PTSD, an action plan is in place.
Well, that depends.
The gold standard for PTSD treatment is that your unit commander instantly understands what’s going on, and you are sent to the Restoration and Resilience Center at Ft. Bliss, Texas. There, you will be treated with dignity, honor, and respect in a lodge-like setting that includes the best of Western medicine and alternative therapies. The center offers traditional psychiatric and psychological services, but also uses massage, acupuncture, and even field trips to Wall-Mart as part of an immersion healing program that brings results.
Like I said, that’s the gold standard. But the DOD’s can-do attitude toward PTSD recovery does not always trickle down to the unit level. Some commanders apparently still haven’t seen the memos. They don’t seem to understand what the rest of the military knows about PTSD and how to treat it. In some units, it’s almost as if it’s against the regs to have PTSD.
Witness, for example, the story of “Tug Grogan” (real name withheld at his request). Tug is a combat veteran and former Airborne Infantryman who came out of Ft. Bragg. Over the past few days, I have exchanged a number of messages with Tug. He has agreed to let me tell the story of his own experience with PTSD recovery.
These are a condensed version of his words.
I spent a total of three years in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq and saw horrible things and lost some of my best friends. The unit doctors were told to tell us nothing was wrong with us and they treated us like crap for even wanting to talk to somebody about the stuff we did and saw. The mentality was “we are an elite airborne unit” and if you tried to get help for even something as simple as a common cold you were shunned and called all kinds of names.
If you pushed the PTSD issue far enough in my unit they would treat you like crap and give you a medical discharge or just tell you to suck it up and there is nothing wrong with you. After one of my best friends was killed in Iraq I had 2 brand new soldiers that came to my unit weeks before we deployed. Both of them would stay awake at night because they couldn’t get the image out of their heads. I tried to talk to them as much as I could because I had already been on multiple deployments and had learned how to “cope” with stuff like that. I went to my platoon leader and platoon sergeant, both had never been deployed before, thus, making them even worse than a brand new private because they had all the rank and no real world deployments, and told them about the guys having problems and they did not do a thing about it. I pretty much got in trouble for saying something to them about it too.
I don’t know if I have PTSD or not but I can tell something is not right. I’m not the same as I was before and the doctors in the army and the VA keep telling me that basically I’m a walking poster child for PTSD but they do nothing to help me. I can’t get anywhere with these people other than occasionally they give me medications that make me feel worse than I did before. Medications that make me think more about what I’m trying to forget.
I cannot stand that soldiers are getting treated this way!!!
