Word: mentalities
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...trickle of new drugs became a flood after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Details of America's medicated wars come from the mental-health surveys the Army has conducted each year since the war began. If the surveys are right, many U.S. soldiers experience a common but haunting mismatch in combat life: while nearly two-thirds of the soldiers surveyed in Iraq in 2006 knew someone who had been killed or wounded, fewer than 15% knew for certain that they had actually killed a member of the enemy in return. That imbalance between seeing the price...
...Repeated deployments to the war zones also contribute to the onset of mental-health problems. Nearly 30% of troops on their third deployment suffer from serious mental-health problems, a top Army psychiatrist told Congress in March. The doctor, Colonel Charles Hoge, added that recent research has shown the current 12 months between combat tours "is insufficient time" for soldiers "to reset" and recover from the stress of a combat tour before heading back...
...These days Ritchie - now a colonel and a psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general - thinks the military's use of SSRIs has helped destigmatize mental problems. "What we're trying to do is make treating depression and PTSD - especially PTSD, which is quite common for soldiers now - fairly routine," she says. "We don't want to make it harder for folks to do their job and their mission by saying they can't use these medications." Ritchie, who communicates "six times a day" with her colleagues in the war zones, says she is unaware of "any bad outcomes" resulting...
...About a third of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq say they can't see a mental-health professional when they need to. When the number of troops in Iraq surged by 30,000 last year, the number of Army mental-health workers remained the same - about 200 - making counseling and care even tougher...
...Burnout and compassion fatigue" are rising among such personnel, and there have been "recent psychiatric evacuations" of Army mental-health workers from Iraq, the 2007 survey says. Soldiers are often stationed at outposts so isolated that follow-up visits with counselors are difficult. "In a perfect world," admits Nash, who has just retired from the Navy, "you would not want to rely on medications as your first-line treatment, but in deployed settings, that is often all you have...