Word: mentales
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...retrospect, Disneyland wasn't an ideal family-vacation spot for Mark Waddell, a Navy SEAL commander whose valor in combat hid the fact that he was suffering from severe mental trauma. The noise of the careening rides, the shrieking kids - everything roused Waddell to a state of hypervigilance typical of his worst days in combat. When an actor dressed as Goofy stuck his long, doggy muzzle into his face, Waddell recalls, "I wanted to grab Goofy by the throat." (See pictures of an Army town coping with PTSD...
...through multiple deployments is going to be affected," says Dr. Matthew Friedman, director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' National Center for PTSD. But nearly half of these cases, according to the Rand study, go untreated because of the stigma that the military and civil society attach to mental disorders. The suspect in the Fort Hood shootings, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, counseled returning vets with PTSD, though there is no proof that this work unleashed his demons. But as Antonette Zeiss, deputy chief of mental-health services for Veterans Affairs says, "Anyone who works with PTSD clients and hears...
When Waddell finally sought treatment, he was ordered to report to a Norfolk, Va., mental-health facility at 5 a.m., wearing his civvies - as though, he mused, it was taboo for anyone in uniform to admit they might be cracking up. As in other areas, the military is undermanned when it comes to mental-health experts. The Army reckons it has only about 400 psychiatrists handling more than half a million troops. That may have been one reason the Army was reluctant to nudge a strangely performing Hasan, who had trained as a shrink, out of the service: it needed...
Care varies from base to base. The previous commander at Fort Carson, Major General Mark Graham, became an advocate for improved mental-health care for soldiers after he lost two sons in military service - one in Iraq and the other to suicide. At Fort Carson, the base hospital is expanding its facilities for mental-health and family therapy, with regular counseling sessions for soldiers and their spouses. But it takes a while for a general's orders to trickle down to the ranks, where platoon leaders are supposed to steel their troops, physically and mentally, against the enemy. Says Colonel...
...Hollibaugh was transferring from Iraq back to Oklahoma, he sat through the obligatory briefings on PTSD with one eye on the clock. "It was the usual stuff: 'Don't kick the cat, don't kill your wife,' " he says. Like many service members, he feared that any confession of mental trauma would delay his homecoming. However mixed up Hollibaugh felt after being the sole survivor of an ambush, he believed that it was nothing that could not be fixed by a burger, a few beers and sex. "Besides," he says, "I thought I was fine." But several weeks later, Hollibaugh...